Page 64 - WTP Vol. IX #2

It’s Thanksgiving Day, and the kitchen counter is covered in pot gummies.
My second-oldest brother, Liam, has painstakingly wrought these trim, grape-flavored squares. He has ordered syringes, molds, eyedroppers, “flower” from Curealeaf, the nearest medical marijuana distillery, and a purple infuser (diffuser? cooker? I’m not up on my pot-cuisine terminology) that looks like a cross between a Keurig and a designer waterbottle.
While my stepmom Rosa recruits me to make the des- sert components of Thanksgiving, Liam squints at his recipe, converting drams to milliliters and halving measurements, trying to achieve the perfect dose and the ideal flavor at once. While I measure brown sugar into a bowl, he reports on the progress of the pot- cooking-device. “This will make the house smell like weed,” he repeats. “Sorry.” (He’s delighted.)
There are five us in the house, five adults locked in a maladjusted and quarantined folkdance: my dad,
the very Greek patriarch, carpenter/handyman, and bastion of conservative Christian values; Rosa, the immaculately turned-out Italian huntress of dust, dirt, and domestic disorder; my youngest brother George, the body-builder physicist endlessly working on his glutes, quads, and PhD.; Liam, dubbed “perma- nently partially disabled” by Medicare, by necessity a chemical wizard of all things that reduce physical and emotional pain; and me, a thirty-something artist/ creative with Peter Pan syndrome and neurotic ten- dencies. (We also have a tenant, Lucy. As far as I can tell, she’s perplexingly normal. It naturally follows that she doesn’t come into this story.)
Liam’s miracle of turning weed to gummy treats is the one constant on the roller coaster ride that is Thanks- giving 2020, a many-tentacled tug-of-war between precaution, paranoia, governmental interventions,
propaganda, and religio-political rants. The gyrations of the holiday can be broken down for dissection into several phases:
a) First, the plan was that Dad and Rosa would go to Rosa’s parent’s house while my sister (who, along with my oldest brother, Aaron, is a successfully fledged adult and therefore semi-liberated from the antics of the Clan) and myself went to our biological mother’s brother’s house, and then on Friday Dad’s family would descend on our home for Thanksgiving: Greek Edition!
b) But then, everybody/somebody/a few people (the details remain shrouded in mystery, not to say recrimination) convinced Rosa’s mom, whom I will call Grandma Linguini, that having even a moderately massive gathering during a pandemic was a bad
idea, and the Italianate component of the festivities fractured into several smaller gatherings at various people’s houses.
c) Once this plan was in place, my uncle’s middle daughter, my cousin Jill, came down with Covid, which automatically cancelled the Northern Euro- pean festivities.
d) At this point I declined an invitation to accompany the Progenitor & Co to his cousin’s Thanksgiving party on the grounds that this cousin always asks
me whether or not I’ve found a husband yet, acts shocked when I say no, and the rest of the conversa- tion centers around matchmaking and female lack.
e) Then, on the Italian front, Rosa decided to cel- ebrate at home with me and my sister (henceforth known as Boudica) since she was upset with her family for “manipulating” her mother into a “state of fear” about a silly thing like a global pandemic. She, Rosa, was therefore rebelliously staying home and not throwing a party. Rosa is the single most extra- verted person I know, so this decision was entirely against her nature. With this decided, it was agreed that there was to be no “real” Thanksgiving at all, although the Greeks remained scheduled to invade on Friday.
f) Finally, when I wake up Thursday morning, Rosa announces that “Grandma Linguini felt terrible” and insisted we all go to her house, corona be damned. In fact, Grandma “would not take no for an aswer.”
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Thanksgiving 2020
Karen StruMpoliS