To Grandmother's (Surrogate) House We Go

Thanksgiving interlude before the mad rush, a holiday for history and family

Granny has become metaphorical since we lost her 1994 (at the tender age of 92), but the tradition of the Granny-inspired gathering remains intact.  A small family by European-American standards, my mother's kin still show those nearly universal qualities of genuine affection, polite conversation, and occasional episodes of hopeless dysfunction.

For Christmas, 19^th-century Americans traveled "over the river and through the woods."  For Thanksgiving in the 21^st century—the all-American family holiday—general practice for us moderns is to get "jammed off the E-ways onto the old freeways," in our holiday transit to visit the relatives.

Let's call my particular version the Cronin Thanksgiving tradition; it has been carried on for decades by Mary and John Cronin, our perennial hosts, in South Haven, Michigan.  Their humble abode lies in the center of town about three five-irons east of the Lake Michigan shoreline.  Mary has lived in this same house since she was born.

Here's the family tree to orient you:

Mary is my cousins' father's sister.  Mary also roomed with my mom at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, after the Big One (WWII).  Wild and crazy girls they were in their day, too, sometimes even holding hands with a guy on the first date.  (!)

Fate has most of the Monroes winding up on the west side of Michigan, and most of the Wests, ironically, on the east side.  Through constant geographic percolation, people in our family have lived everywhere from England to Kansas (Kansas is a "red state," where, nonetheless, Dorothy gained notoriety by illicit activity with the Tin Man and accomplices).

The Cronin Thanksgiving tradition began somewhere in the late 1940s as a pure Norman Rockwell painting, with most of the Monroes making the trip from Kalamazoo or Battle Creek to South Haven.  About 40 years later, starting in the late 1980s, Mom and I, after taking separate professional paths through Texas and returning to Michigan, were invited.

My routine is generally to pick up Mom in the western Detroit suburbs, drive across the state to Battle Creek, reconnoiter there with my two aunts, then the four of us navigating obscure Lewis and Clark Indian trails for another two hours to South Haven.  Sometimes, cousins Marilyn and Nicole come down from Grand Rapids.

In the 1990s, the Rockwell painting is only just beginning to lose some luster.  Thanksgiving is a clan favorite, and I fondly absorb the smells and tastes.  The custom before leaving Battle Creek is to spear some smoked salmon between a pair of Ritzes, downing it with a shot of Akvavit, the Danish national vodka.

When we arrive at the Cronins', mid-morning, the delicious aroma from the oven wafts through the parlor.  Mary places sausage links around the roasting tray, serving them as tasty appetizers.  Various bottles of spirits are presented on a tray, though sparingly imbibed (Mom and her sisters typically have four legal shots of hard liquor per year, two at Thanksgiving and two at Christmas).

As for me, give me a shot of Jack Daniels and/or give me a beer.  Or both.  Or two.

John is pleased that I come to the turkeyfest, because we are the only guys.  John knows when my arm is twisted I will drink more than one beer—especially to dull the pain of watching the Thanksgiving Day Turkeys'… er, Detroit Lions', football game.  So he always packs a few extra Budweisers for me in the vegetable bin of the fridge.

The Cronins set out an assortment of nuts, cookies, and candies.  I love to fiddle with the walnut cracker while contributing to family conversations, especially catching up with my cousins.  How's work going?  Movies and books?  People questions.  Marilyn is cynical and downputting about many things, so I tread lightly there (once I confessed to liking the Beverly Hillbillies TV series, and she didn't talk to me the rest of the day).

As for depth of conversation, heck, these people are "family," meaning you may have just won the Nobel Prize or the Pulitzer, or have been picked to join the next crew on the Space Shuttle—"don't worry, be happy," smalltalk prevails.  This isn't about your maximum psychological visibility, it's about sociobiology.  Balance and "kind"ness.

Say you're a movie star at your annual family affair in Podunk, do you think you (or anyone else) want to dwell on your latest movie news?  No, everyone wants to share in a common denominator of experience.  Thus, you share mundane stuff, e.g. your leaky faucet or your nosy neighbor, for which the members of your biological circle have data points.

Of course, guys have sports to talk about.  Also cars and golf, if we're lucky.  (Some guys hunt—I tried that at a later age, but my only deer connection was the one that ran into my front fender.)  Yet macho flash lives, reminding us that, once, men literally brought home the bacon, so I pay homage to the "successful-survival" component of the day's celebration.

Dinner time.

How many turkeys and hams are consumed in America at Thanksgiving?  A bunch.  In addition we have mashed potatoes, dressing, gravy, buttered rolls, sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, and obligatory veggies and salads.  Then pumpkin pie, pecan pie, whipped cream, and ice cream.  And don't forget, the aforementioned hors d'oeuvres: nuts, candy, cheese, starchy fillers, wine, liquor, and beer.  "Enough!"

I read once the average American gains seven pounds at the end of the year.  Heck, try the end of the day!

After dinner, we have a choice: watch the Lions get embarrassed on national TV or walk down to the lake with the womenfolk—my cousins, Mom, and my aunts (the recreational walking days of John and Mary are behind them).  Usually, I last about ten minutes into the game, John and I exchange a few "Damned Lions!" then I catch up with the walkers.

A chilly walk it is, too, these fourth-Thursdays in November in South Haven.

The first snows of the season are usually closing in.  We head down Main Street into the city, then west along the Black River, and toward the beach, it's maybe a full mile round trip.  At the end of a long pier sits an abandoned red lighthouse.  If ice hasn't formed over the water, breakers strike the beach in soothing counterpoint to the soaring, wailing gulls.

Great exercise for heart and soul.

Returning through town, I always feel strangely yet comfortably nostalgic.  These old burgs, born only a handful of generations before I was, are precious.  Fortunately, large parts of cities like South Haven are fixed in architectural space-time with brick, wood, and glass, like an ancestral footprint showing the direction of yesterday's trail to tomorrow.

Back to the domicile, everyone soon disperses with hugs, busses, and goodbyes.  Ahead lies a long, sleepy journey home in substantial traffic on dark roads.  Check off another year of the glorious Cronin tradition.

###

The Rockwell painting is fading fast now.  My aunt Jane, the one who married Mary's brother Todd, died a few years ago.  John died last spring.  Mary at 81, with two metal hips, can no longer perform the in-home food preparation.  My girl cousins went into a downward mind-spiral after losing their mom, and don't want to be with us any more.

Aside from a few local friends of the Cronins, who used to drop by following the meal, Mary doesn't have anyone to continue her deal.  My aunt Deborah, my mom Beth, Mary, and me, basically we're the Last of the Mohicans.  Last Thanksgiving we met at a truck stop on the Watervilet exit off Interstate 94, this year we partake of a buffet at the Lakeside Bowling Alley restaurant on Blue Star Highway.

The food is okay, the people friendly, but it's just not the same.  Going through the motions is all.  In a town of 5,000 people, everyone knows Mary and they all say hihowyadoin, and her friends do look after her, drive her places, during the year.  As long as she wants her distant relatives to come over for Thanksgiving, we'll keep her Thanksgiving tradition alive.  And ours.  After that, who knows?

In the words of Max Kellerman in the 1987 movie, Dirty Dancing (discussing the decline of his upstate New York summer resort business in the early 60s), "I just have a feeling it's all ending.  Trips to Europe, that's what the kids want!"

In that light, I think of my nieces and nephews just beginning their frenetic, Future Shock-laden adult lives.  Has the above TD tradition ended for them already?  What can they know, much less salvage, of the slower-paced, geographically stable world of John and Mary Cronin?  Well, here's hoping this modest time capsule can provide some clues.