Table stretched into the living room . . . and back in history

    As I sat at the last seat available on Thanksgiving day, way out at a card table in the living room, it struck me that most of the people in the two rooms could not see just how far the tables stretched.
    We were all counting blessings, as we should. But a couple of us, the older ones, could see the tables of past years, and see faces that were no longer present.
    Our youngest diner is five, and two of the newest at the table joined the clan only a month ago, by marriage; a ready-made family for one of my cousins. We were hardly a Norman Rockwell portrait, but an all-American family, nonetheless; two widows (one recently remarried), partners and ex partners with stories of failed marriages and new starts, lots of happy memories and a few bad ones, and above all, high hopes.
    During the course of the day, there were casualties; two turkeys, for starters, and there was a broken dish, one burned dish of oyster dressing, a broken vase while the kids tore around the basement, and one little one threw up, but hey, it was, on the whole, a good day.
    Some of us seem to get together on only this one day a year; perhaps again at Christmas, or when there is a death or a wedding. Most of us have friends that we know better than some of the family, but it's still important, somehow, to spend this time together. There were several missing; conflicting commitments. But so it goes.
     At least the tables keep telescoping into the next room. They've actually stretched out of other kitchens and dining rooms in other homes, other years. The first Thanksgiving dinner I can remember was at the Witter home on Main Street in Manchester, in 1946. We were a new family in town, and the Witters shared half a turkey with us a little more than a month after we arrived.  We ate the other half of the turkey at our house on New Year's Day.
     Other memorable Thanksgivings were in the homes of my wife's grandparents, and then her parents, and the tradition has become ours, together. No one assigned it to us. It just happened.
     After they all went home, my wife and I watched a rerun of an old episode of The Waltons, the one where it seemed the family was fragmented beyond salvation, some with bickering and some by work and travel in the winds of the world, and the country was in mourning following the assassination of President Kennedy.
     Somehow, everybody got back to the old house on the mountain in Virginia, and Ma and Pa decided not to move into that new house they had always wanted to build but could never afford while the kids were growing up in the Great Depression, and John Boy made it home right after dinner, and .... well, it was pretty corny, I guess.
     Capped off my day just perfectly.