On Thanksgiving, I Miss My Family

I had a dream of being the only person in America receiving both Social Security and Chanukah gelt.

My grandmother, Gussie Belinsky Wadler, and my uncle, Artie, in 1950 in the Catskills.

I grew up in the Catskills, in a fading resort town called Fleischmans, where the population in the 1950s exploded in summer with refugees from Hitler.

There was, in fact, a story I came across on a Facebook group, that two sisters, who had assumed the other to have died in the concentration camps, discovered each other at the movies in Fleischmanns.

“Then everybody around them hollered, ‘Sit down!’ Herb says when I tell him about it.

Herb is not a sentimental guy, especially around families. His relationship with his mother was what people might call troubled. I never met Herb's mother because Herb felt that if we met, me or she or, more likely, both of us, would be complaining about the other for the rest of Herb’s life and he wouldn’t be able to take it. There was nothing Herb’s mother didn’t complain about. Once on her way to visit family, she and her sister, Rose, stopped at a bakery to pick up pastry and Rose pointed out a lemon cake.

“Who brings a lemon cake?” Herb’s mother said, which has become a running joke with me and Herb when encountering hypercritical people in Manhattan, which is everybody.

“I miss your mother,” my mother’s good friend Gayleen writes me from Florida this morning.

I miss my whole tribe around Thanksgiving:

My mother, who, in the quiet times at “Traviata,” would announce to the Met, in a volume that shamed the baritone’s, “That Joe Green – he was good.”

My father, who spent my childhood screaming, “PISS your money away!” but who, after I grew up and moved to the city and became a reporter, would slip me $50 as I was about to head back and say, “Buy yourself a hat.”

My grandmother, who thought I was perfect, an honor she gave to no one else except all her other grandchildren.

My Uncle Artie, a sharpshooter in the Marines, who went to turkey shoots a few days before Thanksgiving and always came home with a turkey.  

My Uncle Hymie, who was sending me Chanukah gelt when I was in my 60s but died before I could realize my dream of being the only person in America to be on Social Security and still be getting money on Chanukah.

My Aunt Shirley, who spent her life in search of the perfect brownie recipe and always sent a platter of brownies with me back to the city for Herb. Dozens of brownies, which I’d carefully put on the passenger seat beside me until the smell finally got to me. There was a toll booth (remember those?) on the south side of the Tappan Zee Bridge (remember that?), and while I waited in line, I dipped into the stash.  Now, every time I drive by that spot, I remember those brownies.

The gifts, however, could only go in one direction, generationally speaking.   

 I liked to go to Russ & Daughters on the Lower East Side to pick up a grand spread for Hymie and the gang; lox (salty, the way I remembered it), two kinds of Nova (we had become much more sophisticated); chopped liver, creamed herring, whitefish, cream cheese with and without chives, bagels, for the pleasure of watching my Aunt Shirley unpack it and that it met her standards. Then my Uncle Hymie would try to slip me a few hundred. I would refuse because I was an adult, making a living, proud to be able to bring my family an extravagant present.

It never worked. I’d go into my bag later and the money from my uncle would be stuffed there.

But finally – you figure things out when you’re in your sixties – I came up with the idea of hiding my bag immediately after I arrived.

And it worked! I presented my Russ & Daughters haul and Hymie had no choice but to accept my present without giving me money.

I was pretty pleased with myself. The next day, I got in my little Miata, put the top down, and headed down Route 28 back to New York. Outside of Kingston, just across from the car wash, I sneezed and reached into my bag for a tissue. And realized, just in time, I was about to blow my nose in a hundred-dollar bill.

On Thanksgiving, I miss my family.