On a Thanksgiving morning over half my life ago, my mother and I climbed into my college-graduation-present Datsun station wagon and set off from Chicago to Santa Barbara, California. My sister stood by the kitchen door in her pajamas and cried. My father, who had never lived more than half a city away from his parents, sent us off with a single warning:
"Don't let anybody sell you a new air filter because the old one's dirty. They're supposed to be dirty."
For the second time in her life, my mother had to learn the two-step of a manual transmission; it had been twenty years since she owned a car with a clutch. As for me, I was finally past the stage where the car died every time I tried to shift from first into second. We were ready to go. We had our Auto Club trip-tix and a plan: Eight hours of driving each day, in alternating two-hour shifts.
That put us in St. Louis, Missouri on Thanksgiving night. In a Howard Johnson's motel at nine-thirty in the evening, to be exact. For the first time in my life, I was not at a family Thanksgiving dinner with the usual suspects - sweet potatoes with orange juice and tiny marshmallows, my mom's unsurpassable homemade stuffing, a plump turkey that always defied the twin demons of dryness and greasiness. I was at the Hojo buffet with my mom, and we were the last two guests, to boot. No warm Norman Rockwell scene for us; just dregs in the chafing dishes and a wait-staff impatient to get home.
I was brave enough to have packed up my belongings and the money I'd saved for graduate school, to see what life at a little alternative newspaper in California was like - to spend six weeks without a life plan, until the day I either had to drive back to school to register for classes, or stay put. Getting through a non-Thanksgiving Thanksgiving, though, felt like more than I could handle.
And yet my mom - who like my dad had never lived more than a half-city from her parents - did a very good job of faking a great time that night. She acted like it was an adventure, like there was nothing odd about two women whose family life revolved around holiday meals settling in for a nicely ashen slice of turkey breast.
She never complained about the vast flatness of Nebraska. She was polite but firm with the gas station attendant who insisted we really, truly needed an air filter; we didn't start laughing until we had merged onto the freeway without gnashing the gears. The digestive apocalypse that followed our first multi-course Mexican lunch in Albuquerque became the stuff of family legend. And when I insisted that we exit at Santa Barbara Street, which of course bore no connection to the town of the same name, she didn't get angry. Or if she did, it didn't last.
We got back on the freeway, we found Santa Barbara, and the next day I drove her to the airport to return to the Midwest. I never did. The day when I was supposed to leave came and went, and I did not get in my car; the grad school money became a deposit on a tiny house, and we never again lived in the same city. The same state. The same time zone.
She has grandchildren older than I was, then, and her family spans the country, from Atlanta west to the ocean. I know she envies her friends whose kids live nearby, because she's not too much of a saint to say so - and now that my own daughter is eighteen, and we have spent the last week counting the hours until she flew across country for our Thanksgiving, I know why.
But my mom got in the car, because I had someplace I had to go, and she wanted to give me a proper send-off. She never said don't. So it seems appropriate today, however belatedly, to say thanks for that.
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