My mother and I met my brother and his girl-friend at McMenamin's Kennedy School, a former elementary school in North Portland, converted to a funkified hotel. The walls are decorated with panoramas of the early 1900s. The auditorium is now a movie theater. A janitor's closet is the Detention Bar. We met for brunch in the restaurant. My mother had French toast, I had eggs. My brother and his girlfriend had omelette-like concoctions. We swilled some coffee, took a few cellphone pictures to commemorate the occasion, and called it good. The rest of the day has been devoted to laundry and other creative endeavors.It occurred to me last night that I have never drawn a basket. You'd think I would have, considering the name of my blog is the Hellish Hand-basket. So, last night while watching a compilation of Saturday Night Live Thanksgiving-related skits, I sketched this drawing. My intention was to express my gratitude to you for reading my blog for the past year and a half. All 5,000 of you. Yes, that is how many hits I have attracted in that time. Not enough to monetize, ha. Considering this is an anonymous blog, though, and only about five friends and my sister know about it, I think I'm doing pretty good. So, thanks.
Yesterday I scanned some family photos. I examined each picture, front and back. Some were of people I never knew, or didn't know well: great-grandparents, grandparents, friends of my parents, cats my parents had after I left home... lots of history was made without me, apparently. (Hard to imagine.) There was an entire album dedicated to my older brother, the special firstborn baby. Then there are a bunch of snapshots of me, mostly with him. I'm the sidekick, later the punching bag, but those moments were never caught on camera. (See Mom, that was the time he broke my nose!) Then bam, along came my sister, and one year after that my little brother, the bonus baby. With four children to herd, my mother lost her mind for a decade or so, resurfacing after everyone but the bonus baby had scattered across the continent.
Thanksgivings were tense affairs when I was growing up, mostly due to the power struggle between my mother and her mother. The men watched football, the women duked it out in the kitchen. The kids laid low. The best Thanksgiving I ever had was when my sister and I lived in Los Angeles at the same time. My boyfriend went off to eat turkey with his family, and my sister and I watched a movie and ate popcorn. Then there was an earthquake and a rash of fires in Malibu, and she couldn't wait to high-tail it out of L.A. Anyplace must have looked good after that. No Thanksgiving since has been so satisfying for me. Thanks, sis.
