The Morning After

On Friday morning, the dishwasher - the one we bought the day after Thanksgiving two years ago - was open and full of clean glassware; I had washed the first load of dishes soon after we had finished eating, but there were still people at the table, and we had left the glasses in place. So sometime during the evening Tom did a second load. There were still some dishes left to wash, and of course there were leftovers. Empty bottles to put in recycling, and lots of wine left; it was only Tom and Mark who lingered at the dining room table into the night, this year, and we had been prepared for more, just in case.

It was a couple of weeks ago I asked Tom how many people we were expecting for Thanksgiving, and he said he didn't know. This was a little alarming, but when I asked if he remembered who all he had invited, he said he did. Sunday night we were at Little Szechuan for dinner and it seemed like a good time to ask him for the guest list; I wrote down the names on a receipt in my wallet and then counted them up. It was eleven, if Angela came, and ten, if she didn't. Ten or eleven is a good number; we can seat ten people at the dining room table pretty comfortably, which meant we could squeeze another in if we needed to. Iain really doesn't like being relegated to the kids' table so I was glad we all would fit.

An unexpectedly anxiety-inducing road trip last Saturday to pick up the turkey. I had forgotten that we'd ordered a heritage turkey again this year, until I got the email from the farm that pick-up day for turkeys was November 19, from noon to 3 p.m. So we could pick up Caroline on the same trip, since Athens is on the way. Let's hope there's not a football game.

But there was a football game. Tom talked to both the Athens police and the university police, and they told him we should be able to drive around Athens during the game, there just wouldn't be anywhere to park. The game was, roughly, noon to 3 p.m. But it should work if we picked up Caroline at noon and then went to Elberton to get the turkey, or got the turkey at noon and then went to pick up Caroline.

Elberton was farther from Athens than we remembered, and the GPS plowed us into game traffic, and of course we didn't have a map to figure out an alternative route. But it all worked out. At the farm, there were very cute piglets in a pen and a flock of guinea fowl wandering around. Tom measured the turkey with a tape measure to make sure it would fit in the smoker (it would), and then our turkey went into the cooler and we headed for Athens.

Most of the campus had sort of a neutron-bomb-had-hit-it feel - tents and folding chairs but no people, and many of the students already gone for Thanksgiving break - but there were a few groups that had stayed in place and were watching the game on television. (I wondered later if they also had generators there, to run their televisions.) We got out of town before the game ended, although on the way back to Atlanta it feel a little like we were trying to outrun a tsunami that we thought might be behind us. But it all worked.

When the job is complex, timing is critical, and the consequences are high, one can minimize the chance of failure by establishing standardized procedures and making checklists. And that's how I do Thanksgiving dinner. We have roughly the same menu every year, and I have in my Thanksgiving binder a master ingredient-and-shopping list, and I make notes on things that need to be done differently next year. But the bread machine's broken (it makes noise but no longer moves the bread around - I think we probably wore it out) and since we weren't expecting Fred after all, I really needed to make bread. I had tried to get the things ahead of time that my neighborhood Kroger stores had sold out of in Thanksgivings past, and shopped for the rest of it on my way home from work on Wednesday. We had yeast and whole-wheat flour, but I forgot that we needed powdered milk for the bread so Tom stopped for it on the way back from the gym Wednesday night.

Wednesday night, I made the cranberry sauce and cooked the squash. Thursday morning, I started the bread as soon as I was up, but it wasn't in time to avoid conflict with the pies for cooking temperatures. Kroger had changed the recipe on the back of the pumpkin can - it now called for heavy whipping cream instead of one of the cans of sweetened condensed milk - and we didn't have whipping cream, but we did have another recipe in the notebook with my lists. After Sarah had the pumpkin pies in the oven, Caroline made a blueberry pie using a new recipe. I tried to bake the bread with the blueberry pie but the oven was too hot and I thought I'd ruined it. So Tom went to the store for bread and I called him while he was there and asked him to get aluminum foil. Maybe the bread would be okay if I covered it with foil while it finished baking. It was sometime after my near-meltdown over the failed bread that Sarah said, "I love Thanksgiving. We all get mad at each other in the morning but then when we sit down to eat it's all okay."

Fred came by after all, before we ate, and he and Keith traded notes about serving on aircraft carriers during the Vietnam war. The food was great. Mark came and Angela did not. Keith and the girls left after dessert but Mark stayed into the evening and he and Tom talked about music and played guitars.

The dishwasher worked just fine. Fred brought us a loaf of sourdough bread, and after baking a while longer with aluminum foil on top, my whole-wheat bread was fine, too.

It was a good Thanksgiving.