Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

Tales from Exit 22 by Al Batt

No jiggling of a handle was required.

To prepare for the feast of feasts, the outhouse had been equipped with store-bought toilet paper and comforting peach papers. A Monkey Ward’s catalog was kept in reserve.

We have Thanksgiving because we need to be reminded of all the beauty there is in the world.

We were blessed but didn’t know those were the good old days. We had food and we had enough of it. My mother was a wonderful cook. Her goal was to make the world a better place, one meal at a time. She loved seeing people filled to their fill lines.

Thanksgiving brought family and those who were alone. Mom welcomed strangers and their hunger. Lev Vygotsky wrote, “Through others, we become ourselves.”

Everything in our house became a table.

Thanksgiving was the one day when the Seven Deadly Sins were reduced to six, with gluttony being permissible. Pride, avarice, envy, wrath, lust and sloth remained on the no-fly list.

Moderation took the day off. We passed all the dishes in one direction, but they lost their way and traveled in all directions at once.

Adults became cheerleaders. “You should eat.” “You eat like a bird.”

I wished they wouldn’t say things like that in front of the turkey.

We feasted on turkey, ham, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes/yams, corn, cranberry sauce, stuffing or dressing, homemade biscuits with Clarks Grove Creamery butter (biscuits so good I could have buttered them with Vaseline and they’d still have been delicious), squash (one visiting eater said his favorite was Hubbard “squarsh”), creamed peas, coleslaw, green bean casserole, pickles (dill, beet, sweet, bread and butter and watermelon), lefse for eating and using as a napkin, celery eaten for the exercise, pumpkin and cherry pies covered with a mountain range of homemade whipped cream, and Swedish rice or bread pudding. Gravy covers a multitude of sins, but there were no sins there, so we used it to cover mashed potatoes and stuffing or dressing (I never knew the difference between stuffing and dressing and couldn’t look it up because the closest thing we had to Google was the turkey’s gobble and it could no longer talk). If you couldn’t find something you liked, you weren’t looking.

Calories quickly overwhelmed appetites despite the pickle dish stalling by someone’s plate, which delayed its passing. Belts were loosened. We had a TV that needed us. It got two channels and rarely worked at all. It required a needle-nose pliers to change channels. That’s right, we needed to get up to change the channel. Sometimes we couldn’t find the strength to move away from the table. We certainly couldn’t eat another bite of anything. The pies had provided the topper to an ample sufficiency. The instant a single eyelid had slammed shut, my mother piped up. “Oh, no!” she said. We expected the worst. “I forgot to put the carrots on the table.”

That was no relief. We silenced our groans as she put the cooked carrots on the table. We felt an obligation to eat everything. I considered putting whipped cream on the carrots. Whipped cream helps everything go down. It’s the sweet cousin of gravy.

The carrots were good, but it took a lot of chewing before my stomach found room for them.

I ate the carrots I’d put on my plate and by the time I’d finished, Mom had discovered that not all the coleslaw had been devoured. She put a dollop of the shredded cabbage on my plate where the carrots had been. My plate was self-filling.

I grew up as a card-carrying member of the Clean Plate Club. We couldn’t waste food because people were starving somewhere. I wasn’t sure how my binge-eating would help them, but I ate what I was given and licked the plate. A couple of youngsters, too immature to understand the importance of the Clean Plate Club, were allowed to eat around the parts they didn’t like just to keep the ball rolling.

It’s important to know when you’ve had enough. I waved the white flag in surrender. It was a napkin with a turkey on it.

I fought the slaw and the slaw won.

Happy Thanksgiving. I wish you just enough.

Al Batt’s columns appear in the Tribune every Wednesday.