Sure, it’s a setup, but we can handle it

I’m not sure if it was 1980 or 1981, my mother had been rushed to the hospital, again. The sibs were off in their own lives and worlds, I was trying to be nice and around the house because it was to have been “The Holidays”. But there my mother was in ICU and my Dad and I driving home from the hospital, both of us walled in with our own thoughts and our own silences.
Finally the question of food arose, with what would we replace all the usual planning, cooking and feasting?

I had been washing dishes at Thano’s Lamplighter for a few month’s, and they had opened a more upscale spot kitty corner across the parking lot from it. It seemed like a logical place to try for a meal.
We walked in to the windowless, gloomy, grotto and were told we could sit wherever we liked. Clearly because there was no one else at all. Not one other customer.
We took our seats, I ordered vodka (I've been getting served since I was 12) and the stuffed fish, Dad ordered wine and the “thanksgiving buffet”. We ate bad food, drank and talked.

As more glasses of wine were consumed I heard every story of every miserable thanksgiving. The other dying Mother through the evil stepmother. The lonely, can’t afford to go home from college and there’s not really a home to go to anyway. The Navy, the Army and stuck on ship or base stories.

What I took away from that dinner aside from my usual slight food poisoning, from eating at a restaurant, was a vivid sense of the betrayal, confusion and alienation that the lonely, displaced and dysfunctionalized are subject to as the culture sets everyone up with expectations that can rarely be met in any family or situation, no matter how functional.

I don’t think I ever went to another family thanksgiving, I think perhaps there never was another after that year.

Nowadays I go for an hour or two of dinner with my neighbor and his family. That way I can just run away home when the inevitable aggra begins.