Thanksgiving

Dateline: Hollywoods, Little Compton, November 2004. For all those years, we trekked to the Marion Osborn Sherer Memorial Woods for an outdoor, pilgrimesque Thanksgiving. Every member of the clan would arrive, usually from places like Worcester and Boston, but in recent years, from New York and Greenwich, no longer Yankee-centric, watering holes of the family as it spreads out, away from Providence, Fall River and Worcester. A fire would be blazing in the stone hearth, with a scaldingly hot urn of scorched coffee on it. Turkeys would arrive in the back seat of the cars, wrapped in newspapers and blankets to keep them warm. This was an era before the SUV, before the age of the cell phone, a time when the immediate family fit underneath the roof of Red Top Farm and a few of the year-round houses in town. Later on, as the flock grew and Red Top no longer belonged to the family, the fragmentation began. It was not so bad, probably, for some. In any family, any group, there are people who would just as well prefer to be elsewhere with other people, and the high noon meeting around the beech tree in the heart of the woods, a few drinks and a hastily gobbled down meal freed them to move on elsewhere after an hour of two of forced "togetherness." This may have always been the case, but what I remember best was how excited I always was to go there, run around in the woods with my cousins and second cousins and uncles and aunts and once-removeds. Vivid among them all was Grandpa, the patriarch, Joe Sherer in his woolen lumberjack checked plaid jacket, a khaki hat with its long, curved beak of a visor. We were so little or he was so tall, or both. Grandpa would make chewing gum--usually Beemans or Blackjack--appear as if by magic out of the radio in the kitchen. He would take me on his huge tractor while he mowed the lawns with its three gangs of rotary blades whirling. He was the grandpa who had a fireworks display on the same lawns on the forth, who fell down the front staircase on another forth of July, and the first dead person I ever saw, as he lay in an open coffin only feet from where he had fallen days before. Thanksgiving in the Hollywoods does not happen any longer. The property has been subdivided and some of it developed by 'outsiders' and the patriarch and all but a single son, a single in-law son are deceased. The world has turned on the event that in the town's tricentennial and the nation's bicentennial year had been a fixture for some fifty years. That year Yankee magazine displayed a centerfold picture of us standing around the tree, some 76 strong in 1976. It shows the value of traditions, how hard they are to establish, how easily they are lost. Memories, however, of those dozens of sometimes cold and raw, snow and icy afternoons remains with me, and everyone who was ever there, always.