I'm making my dinner now. Such as it is. I just got back from visiting my mother. She lives fairly close by. About a 20 minute drive give or take traffic.  My sisters brought over thanksgiving dinner for my mother and brother. My brother is two years younger than me but lives with my mother. He is an untreated schizophrenic.  You cannot force people with mental illness to take treatment unless they are proven to be a danger to them selves or others. Then it's up to the courts to decide. She will not kick him out so he lives there.

We had a nice talk. She tells me stories of when she was young or about my father. My father died of a brain hemorrhage when he was young. Forty two.  Most of what I know about my father from when he was in the army during WWII and after I get from my mother.  This time she told of Sunday Dinner at her grandparents place in Elyria Ohio. Her grandmother would fix a chicken roast. Not one from the market, a live chicken which she would buy and keep in the basement until Sunday. When she would kill and pluck and fix it for Sunday dinner.  She did not buy much from the grocery store according to my mother. Pretty much just flour  and sugar and probably coffee. Milk came from the milkman, eggs and butter from the butter and egg man and produce from the green grocer.  Even though there was an A&P close by. They were not poor by any stretch. It was that she was an old German lady and that is the way she did things. She even did her own canning, having a separate canning kitchen just for that purpose. Even when I was growing up in Ohio this was the case for many who lived in Cleveland. My aunt got her groceries in a similar manner and my grandmother got her baked goods from a Finnish bakery.

She then told of the time when I was quite young and my father had just quit his job in Cleveland and had not yet been hired to teach at a local High School. He decided to buy a live chicken and prepare it himself to save some money. My mother new what was involved having lived on a chicken farm her father bought during the depression of the 30s. She asked him I he was aware of what was required and he said yes, sort of. After all he had spent his summers as a boy on his grandmothers farm. Well that is not quite the same as actually doing it. So she enlightened him as to the procedure.  Killing it, putting it in boiling water, removing the feathers and all.  But when it came to the part where you remove it's insides,  he lost all enthusiasm for the task.   They did it but that was the first and last time.

Today my mother was in kind of a bad mood about Thanksgiving. Going on about how she hated having all the family come over and the big meal and such when we live up in Ohio. But I have a feeling that was not the issue. As of the last couple of years she has confessed how much she misses my father and I think that now being 89 and her children grown, this is even more poignant during the holidays.  I feel bad that I cannot do more.

In a way I rather miss the Thanksgiving dinners we had in Ohio. With my aunt and uncle and cousins and grandmother. The once a year football game where we did not even keep track of the score.  Had a blizzard one year that lasted through till Christmas so did not do much outside that Thanksgiving.  I think as you get older you value the relationships you have and had more than you did when you were young.  I lost one of my cousins on my fathers side a couple of years ago.  It still feels strange that I will not ever seem him again. 

Well my dinner being complete. The last of the precooked turkey, some gravy and salad and veggies.   Thanksgiving dinner when you are single.