The Road to Thanksgiving

            This year we’ll be doing something completely different for Thanksgiving, but before I get to that, allow me a little trip down memory lane.

            Thanksgiving and Christmas are about getting together with the family to celebrate, so many of my Thanksgiving memories have to do with just that. What’s interesting as I think about it is that in some cases, the act of traveling to the Thanksgiving gathering was more memorable than the day itself.

            Take, for instance, my freshman year in college, when I came home for Thanksgiving feeling considerably more adult than I had a few weeks earlier, and quite a bit more adult than I really was at the time. I don’t remember a thing about the dinner or anything else that happened that weekend, but I have vivid memories of taking a Peerless Stages bus over Highway 17 in the rain and flying home on PSA from San Jose. The plane fare was $14.18, which might explain why PSA is no longer in business. Neither is Peerless Stages.

Snow in Seattle

            In 1986 we were planning on leaving for my mother’s place in Glendale at noon the day before Thanksgiving, but we were making an offer on the house we now live in, and things heated up. Following a frenzy of negotiation, we finally got a deal about 7 p.m. and hadn’t even begun packing. We drove down the next day, and the only thing I remember after we left Santa Cruz is that we stopped at Denny’s in Paso Robles for breakfast.

            A year before that, we went up to Seattle, where my sister Kathe had just given birth to a son. (We were at the son’s wedding this summer, which shows how time flies.) Seattle had an uncharacteristically heavy snowfall just before Thanksgiving that year, and it was tough sledding for the whole weekend. That was the year Kathe insisted on taking us for coffee at a new place that was then the rage in Seattle. I think it was called Starbuck’s, or something like that.

            Then there was the year Kathe and her family flew down Thanksgiving morning. No sooner had we got back from the airport than we found that our oven had gone on the fritz. The turkey ended up being hastily driven to Linda’s mother’s house, where it was cooked and rushed back in time for dinner.

Changing Traditions

            Our parents are all gone now, and the rest of us are more scattered, so the Thanksgiving tradition has changed in recent years. For some time now, it’s been just the three of us — Linda, Nick and me — at home for that holiday. Nick, over the years, developed a flair for seasoning and he’s been in charge of the mashed potatoes, a job he’s performed with distinction.

            This spring Nick went into the Army. He’ll be home for Christmas, but not Thanksgiving, so Linda and I are trying something different. Without a ravenous young man around to help polish off the leftovers, we couldn’t really see preparing a large meal that we’d never be able to finish. So we did some scouting around and made arrangements to pick up turkey meat, stuffing and gravy from a local establishment. We’ll make mashed potatoes and veg to finish the dinner.

            The potatoes won’t be as good as the ones Nick made, but they’ll remind us of him, and they’ll also remind us to be thankful for our many blessings. And after all, isn’t that what the holiday is all about?

Home for Christmas

            When our son, Nick, went into the Army in May, one of the things I thought as I said goodbye to him was that for the first time in his life, he wouldn’t be home for Thanksgiving or Christmas. For some reason, that bothered me more than I thought it would.

            That surprised me, because I’ve never been terribly sentimental about those holidays. When I was a kid, they were often days with obligations, where I couldn’t do what I wanted to or play with my friends. Because of that, the days often felt more like chores than celebrations.

            When I went off to college, the emotional level of the holidays kicked up a notch. Going home then seemed to really mean something and was a way of reconnecting during the period between childhood and adulthood. The difference between home and college provided a yardstick for measuring my progress during that transition.

The Yearly Negotiation

            In 1977, Kathe, my younger sister, and I both got married, and the holidays took on a hitherto unknown dimension. She was living in Seattle, I was living in Santa Cruz, our parents were in Glendale, and the in-laws were in Watsonville and Spokane.

            At that point the holidays got complicated. We would try to get our whole family together for one of the two, and one of us would try to spend the other holiday with mom and dad. That, of course, had to be worked around our spouses’ commitments to their parents, the work schedules of four people and so forth. Planning for the holidays came to seem less and less like a spiritual family bonding experience and more like an acrimonious labor negotiation.

            The parents are all gone now, and the kids are grown up, so it’s a bit simpler. The past few years we’ve either stayed home — Linda, Nick and I — or occasionally gone to Seattle to be with Kathe and her family. It has been considerably more low-stress than before, and there was the certainty that at least our small family would be together.

The Soldier Far Away

            Nick’s going into the Army changed even that dynamic, and we just figured that, buck private as he was, he wouldn’t be able to get time off then. It looked as if, for the first time in 37 years of marriage, it would be just Linda and me for Christmas.

            After basic training at Fort Jackson, S.C., Nick went to Fort Eustis, VA, for advanced training as a helicopter mechanic. If the class had started right away, he would have been done in late October and low man on the totem pole at his new posting after that. But the Army works in mysterious ways.

            It turns out that they didn’t have enough people to start the class right away, so he spent a month at Fort Eustis doing janitorial duty every day, which I’m sure built his character no end. Once training got under way, graduation was set for the day before Thanksgiving.

            Given Linda’s work schedule, flying out then wouldn’t have been feasible. But then the Army struck again. Nick was chosen to stay for additional training on the next generation of Blackhawk helicopters, and his training end date moved to December 14. At that point he’d have two weeks’ leave and wouldn’t need to report to his next post until the first of the year.

            So he got the leave, and he’ll be home for Christmas, arriving late the night of December 18. Given the nature of the Army, it could be his last Christmas home for years, but I’m trying not to think about that. Let’s just enjoy this one.

If Only I Could Just Write …

            I’ve often wondered what it would be like to write a mystery novel if that was the only thing I had to do. Like most first-time authors, I wrote my first book, The McHenry Inheritance, when I could find the time outside my day job. It was a short book, about 200 pages, and the first draft took about six months. I started it in July and finished it Christmas Eve.

            That’s not to say that it was written at any sort of steady pace. I pay the bills by being a freelance public relations and publications consultant in a mid-size market. Essentially, I work when my clients have projects for me, and when they don’t have projects, I don’t work.

            For reasons I’ve never been able to figure out, the business oscillates wildly between feast and famine. It seems that I’m either working until nine o’clock every night or else doing nothing but making sales calls and drinking coffee. Maybe two months out of every year I have a normal workload: enough to keep me busy and profitable, but able to knock off at five o’clock every day.

Start and Stop

            The year I started that first book, I had an insanely busy spring and plenty of money in the bank at the end of June. I’d planned on starting the book in April, but suddenly clients, most of them new, were coming at me from all directions, and I had to do justice to the work for which they were hiring me.

            At the end of June there was a sudden drop-off in business, and I decided to concentrate on the book. July and August were relatively slow for the business, and I was able to make good progress. I probably had 40 percent of the first draft written by Labor Day. At that point the business gods smiled on me again, and things got busy again until mid-November. It wasn’t as crazy as April-June, but less work was getting done on the book.

            For me, at least, writing fiction isn’t something I can do in 15-minute bursts. I have to have a block of at least a couple of hours, where I can really get into it and start feeling the characters and the story. I was busy enough that those blocks of time weren’t reliably there, and I began to despair of my goal of finishing the first draft by year’s end.

           

The Holidays to the Rescue

            About a week before Thanksgiving, a couple of projects ended at the same time, and suddenly nothing was on the horizon, work-wise. In a project-driven business such as mine, the rule of thumb is that if a client doesn’t start a job before Thanksgiving, it will be postponed until after Martin Luther King Day.

            My days were open again, and I got back to the book with a fury. There were a couple of slowdowns along the way, where I had to work through a story or writing conundrum, but I was really ripping, with almost no distractions. At 4 p.m. that last day, I typed the final sentence into the computer, hit save, did a double fist-pump, and headed home where my wife, son, and mother were waiting for my arrival so they could start the Christmas Eve dinner.

            So what if I’d been able to start in July and had nothing else to do? I have a sinking feeling I know the answer. Parkinson’s Law (Work expands to fill the time available) would have kicked in, and I would have dawdled over it, daydreamed more, and drunk more coffee. The last sentence and the fist-pump still would have happened at 4 p.m. on Christmas Eve.