A Feast of Friendship on Thanksgiving

Thursday is Thanksgiving and it is to be warmly hoped that you remember where the big tablecloth is. I think mine is draped over a coat hanger in the front closet and if it isn’t, I don’t know where else to look. So I won’t look right now. It’s a bright blue day with a gingery tang in the air as I write this and maybe I’ll even find the napkins although that may be asking too much.

There will be just three more days until the Thanksgiving pageant and I hope each child has his costume ready. Pilgrims are easy, as I recall. The men Pilgrims do well in old pants died black and tied around the knee. The rest of the costume relies strongly on black and white construction paper, white for the big collar and black for the hat. You can try shoe buckles, cardboard with aluminum foil, but if you’re working with sneakers, I can’t think why you should even try. Nothing much disguises them. The lady Pilgrims lean to long gray cotton skirts, white cotton blouses and white or gray bonnets.

Indians are the easiest. Anything brown in the T-shirt and pants line, head bands and paper feathers and lots of makeup.

Look around you and think of the things you have to be thankful for. Just you. Just your own blessings. While I whine about my knee, there are thousands of things that are especially mine. The thunder, wind, and rainstorm that crashed through Houston one day when I was there last week. I was whooping for joy while the skies lashed and the trees bent double and the leaves blew. The natives were watching the rising rain apprehensively as it climbed to the edge of their doorsills. There’s a truism there somewhere. It depends at whose doorsill the water laps whether a storm is a blessing or not. Of course we have thunderstorms in Los Angeles, but they’re short and petulant. They clap a couple of times and go bustling importantly off.

I am grateful for funny things people say that can make me laugh all my life. I heard a new one at lunch at the River Oaks Club in Houston. My hostess and her friend were talking about the pride and self-satisfaction of the old Houston families, their impregnability to newcomers. Marcia Key said, “It isn’t just Houston. They say in Brownsville, there’s no use coming at all unless you were there before the railroad came in.”

I am thankful for sounds, water falling, wind in pine trees, winter surf crashing on the hard sand, popcorn popping, turkey gravy bubbling.

Most of all for memories and for anticipation and dreams, the other half of the same coin. For friends who can do wonderful things other than what everyone knows them for. For Mike Deaver who, besides his obvious skills in making things work, can play piano, what used to be called saloon piano, the kind you want to hear when you’ve got the my-man’s-gone-and-left-me-and-all-I-do-is-cry blues.

Several men I treasure can play the piano. Maybe that’s one of the things that counts with me. Frank Gannon, who is editor of the Saturday Review, is a piano player. And high on my list of men I have treasured is a good piano player named Joe Thompson, a Beta from Stanford who brought me violets one rainy night in the storied Nickodell from an old lady selling them from a tray around her neck in a scrap of an hour we had between shows. Joe’s had just wrapped and I had a dressing-room call in 60 minutes.

I remember roses my husband, Doug, sent me, yellow ones, the ones he sent on the anniversary of our first date all of our life together. Only these were special because he was crawling across France and Germany in the mud when they were delivered, which meant he had thought to order them from a florist in New York before he had sailed on the Queen Mary four months before.

Another off-the-wall remark that can make me laugh anytime is something a dear friend said when he greeted me at the door: “Oh, I’m so glad to see you. My God, I wish you were the plumber. Every line in the house is backed up.”

I’m rich because I know a man who can say something like that in a time of crisis.

I’m thankful for dogs. Cats, sure. But mostly dogs. For roses and bachelor buttons. For small pink daisies that grew like low weeds in my Grandma Bradley’s lawn. And for the most gossamer sweaters, for the ruffle of silk taffeta, for a dress I have that would make anyone walk like an empress.

For telephones (though I often yell at them) after you lift them and there’s a voice that laughs or tells you something wonderful.

We are all going, that’s Patsy and me, to my son’s house for Thanksgiving, and I am grateful that for the second time since my mother died when I was 18, I don’t have to cook a turkey. I’ll make you a small wager, though. Patsy and I will cook a turkey next weekend because turkey sandwiches are so fine.

May your day be a feast of savory dressing, of love, friends, pumpkin chiffon pie or whatever you do that makes it Thanksgiving at your house.

Lift a glass to everyone you love. I’ll drink to all of you who write to me and delight me so, even though I don’t answer. Here’s to all of us, especially the piano players, and to each one of us, even though we weren’t in Brownsville when the railroad came in. And finally, as always, to absent friends. Happy Thanksgiving.