Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, November 26, 1995 TAG: 9511270014
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: ELIZABETH OBENSHAIN
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Every year for as long as I can remember, we'd pack ourselves into our vintage Plymouth and head down the mountain to Uncle Alonza and Aunt Manie's house, a white stucco bungalow strategically located just a few blocks from Roanoke's Victory Stadium.
Once the car doors opened and all the relatives had been dutifully kissed, my brother and I would trot down the hill and across the expanse of park and river to find the best spot for watching the cadet corps for Virginia Tech and Virginia Military Institute march in splendid and seemingly unending file into the stadium.
The excitement, the pregame pranks between the two corps, the crowds in holiday mood that jammed the stadium all made it an intoxicating atmosphere for kids.
As the game got under way, we'd usually wind back up to the house and play outside, conducting our own fall skirmish with the pinecones from my aunt's trees.
If we wanted more company, we could trot inside, where "the aunts" were cleaning up from a light lunch of ham biscuits, chicken salad, asparagus rolls and pecan pie, preparing the table for the real meal that would come later in the day. The uncles and older brothers who hadn't gone to the game would be in the den watching football and talking politics. Football was just the comforting rumble in the background of the family gathering.
One year, for some reason the entire family - aunts, cousins, uncles, brothers, mothers - decided to go en masse to the game to savor fully the fall ritual played there under our noses.
To this day, I can't recall any of the plays or the final score. I just remember the comfortable sensation of sitting amid a crowd of aunts as tins of homemade biscuits, cookies, fruit cake and finger sandwiches were passed up and down the rows of relatives, drifting often to anyone fortunate enough to be sitting in the next couple of rows. Ever since, I've always pictured Jesus feeding the multitudes as just a slightly expanded version of my aunts feeding the crowd at Victory Stadium.
After the game, the family regrouped at the house. Under the guise of serious dinner preparations, the aunts would check out proposed additions to the family - the latest boy friend or the new fiancee desperately trying to sort out 30 family members at one time.
Finally, it was time for Thanksgiving Dinner. How did Aunt Manie make it seem so easy? The turkey, the scalloped oysters bubbling with butter, the dressing and giblet gravy. The big and little tables set with china and crystal in her cozy living room for a crowd that seemed puny if it didn't number over 25.
There was something grand about those gatherings. And about the people who made them seem so natural, so joyous.
Today, many of the faces, many of the voices I can still hear echoing from the kitchen are gone: Aunt Clarice; Aunt Manie and Uncle Alonza; Lucy and Lizzy, the twin aunts who tied the family together so closely; my mother, who warmed these family gatherings with her kindness.
Yet I am amazed how vividly they live on.
Our Thanksgiving was smaller this year - seven of us gathered at my father's home. The rest were scattered from New Mexico to the Middle East.
But the family traditions survive. The menu was Aunt Manie's down to the scalloped oysters. My father's 91 years, which he carries with remarkable energy and grace, anchoring us with the past. My teen-age nephews tying us to the future. The feeling of family was there - the sense of being part of a whole, of being surrounded by love, of caring and being cared for by people bound to you by ties that no years or distance can cancel.
Perhaps we should be most thankful for that - that we too may live on in our small acts of kindness and love that spread out like a widening circle through our family and friends.
by CNB