It's Thanksgiving and we're going to Aunt Bea's.
Aunt Bea isn't my aunt, but I've been joining her family at Thanksgiving for years now. Her niece Jenny Dobie and I were roommates at Arizona State in 1977 where I was a student and Jen was just taking advantage of cheap digs in the ASU dorms while she went to Mesa Community College, an arrangement her cousins had used in the past. Unfortunately, the university got wise and she was evicted mid-way through the semester, but not before I had bonded with the entire Dobie clan.
Jen and the rest of her seven sisters and brothers live in Indianapolis and the whole family caravans to Alexandria for thanksgiving with Aunt Bea. The whole family, that is, except Jen, who I haven't seen since 1994. She doesn't like to travel. Or that's what they tell me, but I have visions of her as one of those wild-haired ladies who hoards cats and throws dung at the neighbors. I hope so. Jen always had a shamanic quality and the world needs that now.
Thanksgiving with the Dobies is my favorite event of the year. A former journalist and director of research for Time-Life Books, Bea is gracious, elegant, witty, erudite and wise. Her home fills up with her nieces and nephews and their children and a host of people who orbit the family like moons, converging on the fourth Sunday in November to eat and drink and breathe (b.e.d.) . And to play charades.
Family members begin learning charades pre-natally and by the time they can speak are already expert mimes. One ill-fated Thanksgiving I ended up with a poet named Dan and five kids under twelve facing Aunt Bea and all the adult Dobies, a veritable charades all star team. Up first, Julia, the youngest sibling, a Spanish teacher with three children, lifted her left hand and rolled her right in the authorized symbol for movie. Instantly all the remaining siblings yelled, "The Year of Living Dangerously!"
"We are so hosed," Dan said.
I'm not crazy about games or public displays of anything, but I honor the charades tradition. The world needs that now.
Wednesday night I joined Aunt Bea's niece Kath and nephew Fred for the pre-Thanksgiving prep fest to chop, peel, boil, and mash everything we could find in the refrigerator. Kath orchestrates the Thanksgiving event and is the person around which many of the habitual guests, like me, revolve. Her gravitational force is irresistable. While we worked and laughed and threatened each other with sharp objects, the Beatle's greatest hits played in the background. At one point Kath leaned back and lamented, "I wish I still believed Beatle's songs."
"All you need is love," they sang.
Don't be fooled. Kath sent me home at 11 but stayed up until 2 making pie. She believes. And the world needs that now.
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