||| ORCASIONAL MUSINGS by STEVE HENIGSON |||

Governor Inslee’s prohibition against family Thanksgiving dinners, the result of this winter’s resurgence of COVID complications, has caught us with our collective aprons untied. For instance, in recent, more normal years, my wife and I have been invited to our cousin’s home for a family get-together. And in the years previous to that, I had made huge dishes of multiple-nut-and-giblet dressing, and, after first having stopped in the kitchen to help carve the necessary bits and pieces off of a couple of giant turkey carcasses, we had thankfully joined the Odd Fellows’ community dinner.

Not this year. The family dinner has been called off. We are all—cousins, wife, and I—now of an age to be particularly vulnerable to the Chinese disease, and a collective decision was made to, as the Dodgers used to say after losing to the Yankees, wait ’till next year. And it’s the same with the Odd Fellows. There just isn’t room enough for appropriate “social distancing” inside Odd Fellows’ Hall, for the couple of hundred people who show up, and it’s too cold to make everybody stand outside along the edges of Haven Road, so their annual coöperative Orcasian feast has also been suspended for the duration.

But community feasting of one sort or another is the whole point of Thanksgiving. We are supposed to consume representative samples of this year’s harvest, sharing it among the relatives, friends, and neighbors who all helped to bring it to fruition. It is, after all, an act of thanking: ourselves, each other, and, if your beliefs lie in that direction, the omnipotent clockmaker who is running the show. Without the dinner, it just isn’t Thanksgiving.

This year, as noted, there’s only the two of us. Therefore the traditional, table-stressing abundance would be inappropriate, not least because its leftovers would go on interminably. I like turkey, but turkey hash in February is too much of a good thing. A reduction in scale is therefore essential.

Maybe I’ll roast or bake a couple of those humongous chicken breasts that seem to be Costco’s stock-in-trade, perhaps coated with flour, paprika, pepper, and “poultry seasoning” (whatever that is), and then doused in panko, served with whole-berry cranberry sauce on the side. Certainly, I’ll make a pan-full of multi-nut-and-giblet dressing, because leftovers of that stuff verges upon ambrosia. And there’s got to be a dish of mashed yams mixed with cinnamon, nutmeg, brown sugar, and maple syrup, layered with thinly sliced apple and, finally, baked and then crusted with toasted marshmallows. That’s also really good on the second day, and on the third day too. And then, for the green vegetables… Ah, to heck with the green vegetables: They’ll ruin our appetites for the dressing and the yams.

All that’ll be missing will be family or guests, but maybe we can solve that problem too. We’ll try to call up the children on FaceTime or Zoom while they’re having their own dinners, and, if we’re successful, all of us can mainline a family fix for a few minutes of real, live Thanksgiving…if the on-line connection holds and the creek don’t rise. COVID be damned. Happy Thanksgiving.

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