Thanksgiving is no turkey

You can’t go too far wrong with a good Thanksgiving.

For starters, everything smells good all day, even me. Then, everybody’s nice as pie for as long as they can stand it.

It’s our only holiday when we’re supposed to think about what we eat, the folks who produced it and the land it comes from. Thoughts of Pilgrims and Indians may flash by between a wing and the prayer. Then everyone falls asleep watching the Detroit Lions lose another football game.

I’ve shirked my fatherly duties to 23-year-old Molly. She never got either my three-hour, before-the-meal lecture on The True Meaning of Thanksgiving or my four-hour, after-the-meal talk on Indigestion, Its Causes and Cures. Molly has always been happy with her modest vegetarian meal, which excludes all meat and vegetables and incorporates, she says, the good kind of calories that are concentrated in buttered rolls, pies and whipped cream.

I’ve never told her that I was once related by marriage to Oceanus Hopkins, the one child born on the Mayflower during its two-month crossing in 1620. Oceanus made no other history in his three years, though in times like these all of us admire the value his parents placed on liquidity. Read more