Point of View: Let Me Help

I was only joking when I said, “Why not Thanksgiving?” when my first cousin, who’s been after us for years to come down to the Eastern Shore, asked when we’d like to visit. I figured she would laugh it off and say, “Aren’t you the wry one?”

Instead, she welcomed the idea, freeing us from playing host to two score or so, as we usually do. I say “we.” It’s actually Mary upon whom the weight of intensive festive mass gatherings lands. When I said proudly during a Thanksgiving past that I had “helped,” Kitty, Mary’s older sister, almost choked on her torte as she repeated, mockingly, “You HELPED. . . ?”

I was duly chastised at the time, though, as we know, time is a great healer. Soon I’d forgotten all about her rudeness and have been helping myself to more helpings ever since. 

Come to think of it, Kitty didn’t almost choke on her torte, for while she makes all the killer desserts for these occasions, the aforementioned torte, and apple and  pumpkin and pecan pies to boot, she doesn’t eat them. That chore is left largely to me, and I can say with no little pride that I’ve invariably risen to the occasion these many years, with virtually no help at all. None. 

I’m  waiting for the young to step up so that I can, in humble acknowledgment of the cyclic nature of things, pass the baton, but they’ve apparently been programmed to “eat healthy.” It’s amused me that I’ve lived so long despite having eaten in my youth, and in gargantuan portions, liverwurst, Lebanon bologna, pastrami, with extra fat, calves’ liver, scrapple, bacon, French fries, and cheeseburgers, most of it lathered with Hellmann’s mayonnaise, not to mention brown cows, rice pudding, floating islands, apple crisp, hard sauce, and vats and vats of Isaly’s ice cream, pistachio being my favorite.

Thanks to Mary, my diet is healthier now. Why, I’ve eaten so much kale in recent years that my father would be hard pressed, I think, to say, as he once did, that I needed more iron in my soul.

I still can’t get over it that Margot wants us to come for Thanksgiving. She’s a Christian martyr. And I know how I can really help. I’ll make Kitty’s torte.