A Short Thanksgiving Memory

I grew up with the astounding privilege of huge family Thanksgivings at the Ranch -- 50 people was not an unsurprising number. These were orgies of overeating and drinking. I spent many years contributing nothing to the cooking but a great deal to the washing up.

In my childhood, the highlight was always the post-prandial football game on the croquet lawn, and a chance to catch a pass from an older cousin.

My favorite Thanksgiving, though, was ten years ago this week.

In November 2013, I was in Creative Care, a dual diagnosis rehab in Malibu. You know the story: I was disgraced; I was broke; I was facing serious jail time over felony drunk driving; I had no job. By the time I got to Creative Care in early November, I hadn't seen the children in more than three months.

My first visit with Heloise and David was on the Sunday before Thanksgiving. Eira brought them up to Malibu, and we played awkwardly together in Trancas Canyon Park.

Four days later was Thanksgiving, and she brought them back again -- along with an entire kosher turkey dinner she'd picked up the day before from a Jewish deli on Pico. There was dressing, green bean casserole, and mashed potatoes (all parve), and thick slabs of white and dark meat, soaked in gravy, sitting in tin trays.

My soon-to-be-ex-wife had warmed everything up before leaving the Westside, but it was nearly an hour before we sat down at the picnic table in the park.

A year earlier, Eira and I had hosted two dozen friends and family at our elegant townhome, and I had made the toast. Twelve months later, our world was shattered by my madness, my selfishness, and my staggering self-loathing.

Heloise was nearly five; David,18 months. They were shy with me. David had forgotten who I was in my time away, and Heloise had gotten the idea that I was dead. When she finally did see me again, I was bloated and slow; the antipsychotics pumping through my system were keeping me from killing myself, but they made me unrecognizable to her.

My motor skills were so poor I couldn't cut my turkey with the provided plastic knives, so my daughter watched as her mama cut the meat for all of us.

Later, tiny individual pies that Eira had baked. Heloise and I got pecan; her mother and brother, pumpkin loaf. My daughter smiled at me. "Ima says that you like very sweet things, so you like pecan, just like me. Chuchi (her brother's toddler nickname) doesn't like sweet like us."

She fed me with her fingers.

I have had homemade pecan pies from some of the best country bakers from Fremont, California to Franklin, Tennessee, but never one comparable to those made ten years ago this week by an exhausted and worried mother and former wife.

After lunch, Eira bundled the empty containers into a trash bag, insisting I play with the children. We had a soccer ball, and we kicked it on the grass, and I cried a little, and fought the self-pity as best I could.

When it was all over, Eira let me buckle each child into his or her car seat, patient with my fumbling, wanting me to remember that I had a life of quotidian duties to which to return.

“You don't get to leave," she liked to say, "So I need you to learn how to stay."

They dropped me back at the rehab, and we had a tearful goodbye. Heloise wept, and her brother wailed in solidarity, and I pleaded with them to think of the certainty that we'd be together again in just another three days, when they came again to the park.

My daughter remembered something. "Ima, we need to give abba his leaves!"

Eira opened the glove compartment, and pulled out an envelope filled with golden and russet leaves from a tree on her (what used to be our) block. She had told the children their papa was very fond of leaves, and she didn't think there were any trees that changed color around the rehab.

One more round of tears and kisses, and I stumbled back inside, went to my room, wiped my leaking nose and eyes, and shook out the envelope onto my pale blue bedspread. There were at least two dozen small leaves in all the shades of autumn, and I arranged them first into a circle, and then into a rectangle -- for the great Thanksgiving table to which I had, somehow, been allowed to return.