The best part of that morning was the bagels. They were made in Long Island, which in my opinion are the only authentic bagels in the world. I wasn’t labeled a “fussy eater” back then, like all those kids that in modern times might be identified as lactose intolerant or having severe allergies to certain food ingredients, but I preferred pumpernickel bagels to onion, or poppy, or the all-inclusive everything variety. This was because I really liked the word pumpernickel, and rarely got to use it. I avoided cream cheese in those days, though, because the two words didn’t sound like they should go together. Which was fortunate because we didn’t have any that morning. In fact, we ate the bagels mostly dry, and in shredded bits straight from the bag. We’d bought a dozen (a Baker’s Dozen, actually – Long Island was where I first saw this old saying put into practice), and now the six of us sat on a bench at the subway platform trying our best to devour the two bagels we each had coming in order to be the first to claim the prized thirteenth of the Baker’s Dozen.
My aunt and my mom, the Irish Durkin sisters, had given us the money to purchase this extravagant Thanksgiving morning breakfast. We all knew that ordering single bagels, sliced and adorned with butter or cream cheese or made up into some kind of sandwich was the foolish and frivolous practice of the upper class. “A fool and their money are soon parted” was a common axiom of the Durkin sisters, attributed to Jesus or the Blessed Mary or some other saintly deity, surely of Irish heritage, who embraced their poverty and scorned the gaudy and garish practices of the wealthy.
Which is why we were shredding the bagels by hand. We’d been supplied with a plastic knife, but it was one that my mom had pilfered from some fast food joint and it bent unnaturally when we tried to saw through the outer bagel crust. The Durkin sisters had enough pirated plastic cutlery to supply a small country, but we’d been given the one knife for our outing that morning, which we were careful not to break because it was expected to be returned. I could see that several small shards of plastic were already missing from the serrated edge of the thing, so I chose to just rip and eat. We were also allotted a handful of small, foil-wrapped butter pats which came from a different arsenal of stolen restaurant supplies. These had been dumped into the one backpack among us that my oldest cousin wore to signal that he was in charge. By the time we got to the subway station, most of the small packets had been bludgeoned and squished by heavier items. The butter we retrieved was caked with lint, dirt, and other remnants laying at the bottom of the pack. Even so, it was quickly taken up and spread by hand by some of my cousins that morning. They were a family of four siblings, and they knew that only the strong survived, even if it meant a bit of dirt or hair or unknown lint in your breakfast.
We were headed to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. This tradition of coming to my aunt’s house on Long Island had only started a year ago. Before that, we always attended Thanksgiving at my paternal grandmother’s house, which was just up the street from my own in a small Adirondack Town. I remember this being a morose and depressing affair where my sister and I, the only children present, would spend what felt like endless tortuous hours in the cigarette-smoke-filled house while my parents and a handful of ancient relatives droned on and on about things I neither understood nor had any interest in. Eventually, enough people from that event passed away or found other smoke-filled rooms in which to eat their turkey so that we were allowed to go to the much larger, more chaotic, and kid-filled festivities on Long Island. During the first year of the transition, we parked ourselves in front of the tv to watch the Macy’s Parade. I had always watched it at home and marveled at the giant balloons, particularly Underdog and Snoopy – they were my favorite cartoon dogs back in the day. My uncle saw us gathered around the mammoth piece of Oak furniture that housed a15-inch tubed television screen with fuzzy parade images rolling by. He watched for a while before suggesting that we go see the event live at the next year’s Thanksgiving celebration. He was always suggesting adventures into New York City, going to a Met’s game, or driving over to New Jersey with us kids to spend a day at the infamous Action Park for some trauma-based memories and bodily scars that we’d never forget. And it wasn’t just talk – he loved to have a good time, and spared no expense in showing us kids one. If he’d been with us that morning at the bagel store, no doubt everyone could have ordered their own cut and buttered bagels!
But my uncle wasn’t with us because he worked long shifts at the power company and wouldn’t be home until later in the afternoon. And even if he’d been home, my aunt would never have allowed him to go the Parade when so much preparation remained to be done. When we’d gone to my grandparent’s house, the turkey had already been cooking in the oven for hours, the potatoes mashed and the stuffing prepared, all being kept warm until we ate. The handful of elderly guests would totter in with a bowl of dip or a homemade pie to contribute. My grandmother had always taken out her best dishware, hand-sewn napkins, and Oneida Silverware all set over a freshly laundered tablecloth for the event. Grandma had things locked down, even through the smoky haze of the dining room.
My aunt’s house was much different. Everyone seemed surprised that we were there when we arrived from our four-hour drive from “Upstate.” Somehow, the fact that Thanksgiving was actually taking place in less than 24 hours had alluded my aunt and uncle. Nothing was prepared, and things still needed to be bought – like a turkey. My uncle was usually working, and my aunt never appeared to sleep during those visits until Black Friday, at which time she had always made herself ill from the effort of the annual event. She may have slumped over her plate and slept during the actual Thanksgiving dinner, once everything was out, but I’m not sure about this because I never aged into a chair at the “adult table.” I remember there being around 25 – 30 guests each year, divided into three tabled sections which started in the dining room and spread through the kitchen and into the living room. I was assigned to sit at the “kid’s table” in the living room which comprised two wobbly card tables pushed together with a variety of outdoor lawn chairs and the indoor foldable metal type all jammed closely together. If there was a tablecloth, it was thin, wrinkled plastic, sometimes used for the picnic table in the back yard or as a drop cloth for small painting projects around the house. The silverware was a mixture of the plastics I mentioned before and some metal utensils that looked like they came from a school’s lunchroom. These forks and spoons could easily be bent in odd directions and often were, but we soon learned that if you were too overzealous in bending them, they broke at the weakened spot leaving you with only an inch or two of fork tongs or spoon ladle. The plates and glasses at the Kid’s Table were an impressive assortment of paper, plastic, and McDonald’s collectibles which came with the purchase of a soft drink or Happy Meal. I tried to sit where there was McDonald’s dinnerware and a lawn chair because those kids who didn’t tended to get folded up in the metal chairs and fall down – usually dumping Kool-Aid on themselves as they went down. A Tupperware bowl full of Fritos or potato chips was placed on the card table as an appetizer, but that was quickly scooped up and carried off to the kitchen where the “older kid’s table” was.
Despite the great amount of time and effort devoted from Wednesday evening to Thursday afternoon to prepare, we kids were allowed to attend the parade, albeit we lacked parental supervision. As the train neared the station, we finished our bagel shards, passed around the one thermos of hot chocolate that was provided for hydration to my backpack-wearing eldest cousin, and prepared ourselves to board. As soon as the subway stopped, my heart started pounding and my stomach tightened. It looked filled to capacity. Nobody stepped off when the doors opened, and we were among a large crowd of people squeezing ourselves into the fray. There was at least an hour’s ride and countless stops in front of us before we reached Manhattan.
A short aside about my self-diagnosed social anxiety seems appropriate here. As I’ve mentioned, this was a time in the past when few people I knew felt the necessity to burden themselves with cumbersome medical jargon about their various peculiarities and quirks which sometimes (depending on the environmental stimuli) were more pronounced than others. Take the aforementioned “fussy eaters” who would now have to follow a regimented diet, wear a bracelet naming their allergies, or always have access to a shot or medication when needed rather than having their face puff up to cartoonish size or flopping on the ground and gasping for air like a fish as they would have done back in these days (which would undoubtedly have lead to a horrible nickname like “puffer fish lips” that followed them through high school). Today I might have access to a prescription for Xanax or at least a few cannabis edibles when these moments of panic and terror involving big crowds or tight, enclosed spaces presented themselves. Or, if the condition had ever been recognized and diagnosed back then, I might have been sent for more homeopathic treatment like yoga, meditation, and breathing exercises to counteract the adrenaline that flooded my brain and told every cell in my body to either go completely boneless or sprint in the opposite direction. But I was decades away from finding the words to describe these odd and awful feelings or understanding the genetic wiring that caused them. I was also a few years away from taking that first drink of alcohol – the one that lead to many, many more drinks in a fruitless effort to medicate the problem. So, with an extreme pressure building in my head, my recently eaten bagel churning up my throat and towards my mouth, and a strong urge to urinate or defecate at any moment, I allowed myself to be wedged into the overcrowded car.
The subway trip remains somewhat foggy in my memory, except to know that it was extremely unpleasant. There were no cell phones, not even Walkman radios to offer distraction and some sense of isolation from the crowd on the subway car which only got bigger as we neared NYC. When at last my cousin signaled us to exit, we spilled into an underground station that looked (and smelled) strikingly close to how I imagined the garbage disposal room in the first Star Wars movie that I’d seen a year earlier when it came out. In the movie, the room almost crushes everyone, which I was certain would happen to us at any minute. We made our way out onto the street, only to find that my cousin had navigated us off course and we would need to walk several blocks to get to the parade. My urge to relieve myself had only gotten stronger, but there was no way we were going to use the dank and dingy-looking subway bathrooms. It soon became apparent that we would not only have to purchase something in order to use a business’s restroom but that we would also have to wait in the giant lines that had formed at all possible potty stops! Discord and resentment were building among the members of our small group that wanted to hurry up and get to the parade.
By the time we reached a suitable location, my kidneys were nearly bursting and I was becoming incredibly nauseous from the city smells. If you’ve never been, NYC has a very distinctive odor. It’s a mixture of sewer gases, rotting garbage, and a variety of food scents mixed with what I can only describe as rubber-based products all of which are on fire and ever-smoldering in the air. The street we eventually arrived at must have been early on in the parade’s route, because Snoopy, Underdog, and all of the other balloons had passed. This was unfortunate because the balloons were the only thing we could have seen from our position deep in the crowd and far away from the actual road where floats drove by, bands played loudly, and, presumably, all the great things we were used to seeing from our comfortable positions at home and in front of the tv were playing out in real-time.
By this point, I didn’t care about any of it. I just needed to pee. One of my cousins and I retreated from the front lines and walked a long distance through the smoldering stink until we found a Mcdonald’s. We bought a Coke but didn’t purchase the commemorative glass it came in. We then waited in the longest bathroom line I’ve ever been on. When we returned to the parade spot, we found our other cousins alone, standing in the roadway and looking forlorn. Santa had gone by in our absence, signaling the end of the parade route. Only one of our group suggested walking towards Macy’s, where no doubt the biggest crowds were gathered and the festivities had not yet wrapped up. But this cousin was shouted down by the rest of us. By now everyone had to pee, and so did I, because my anxiety remained high and I’d drank all of the Coke on the walk back. So back to Mcdonald’s we went, grabbing some plastic utensils and a few free condiments to offer up to the Durkin Sisters, before trudging to another subway station and heading back to Long Island where I would try to grab a lawn chair at the kid’s table before someone else took it.
Revisiting these moments through the veil of time and what is consciously remembered or forgotten always brings a smile to my face. I admit to a fair degree of artistic license and over-exaggeration in these tales (I am Irish, after all), but my hope in documenting all this is that you might remember and embrace the abnormal and distinctly dysfunctional moments and traditions that define you and your family. In the end, these times and the stories that evolve from them become the stuff of family legacy and legend. I absolutely loved going to Long Island and treasured the time with my family down there. I now have a better idea of the work and sacrifice it took for my parents and my aunt and uncle to pull off such a large gathering of relatives each year. It was done in the spirit of generosity and unconditional love that continues to define the Durkin Sisters and the remembrances of my father and uncle to this day.
Thanksgiving might be my favorite holiday, though I truly enjoy them all. I deeply enjoy sitting around a table, breaking bread, and giving thanks with people I love and cherish. My wife and I have developed different traditions for our kids over the years. Going to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade has never been one of them, and I take full responsibility for that. I do encourage them to sit as close to the tv as they want while we watch it, and every year I assure them that they have the very best view of everything that makes the parade magic – plus our bathroom is clean, free, and just down the hall. I’m sure my kids will share their stories of the stress and chaos and dysfunctional times we’ve had during our many Thanksgivings (and other times) together. But I hope that within those memories they will recall with smiles and warm hearts the love that wove through all of our times together as a family – that’s the tradition I most want to pass on, and my wish for you is that you find and embrace these times in your own family stories!
2 responses to “I Love A Parade (at home-on the tv)!”
What young Brian probably was not aware of at the time was our friends The Dennos raised turkeys. We always bought a huge one from them to bring down to L.I. We needed an industrial size pan to cook it in. We borrowed that from our neighbor Gary John who ran a restaurant. Truly a communion event. Thanks for the memories.
Happy Thanksgiving to you, your family and the Durkin sisters. Thank you for the ride down memory lane.
What young Brian probably was not aware of at the time was our friends The Dennos raised turkeys. We always bought a huge one from them to bring down to L.I. We needed an industrial size pan to cook it in. We borrowed that from our neighbor Gary John who ran a restaurant. Truly a communion event. Thanks for the memories.