The Joy Menu

Share this post

76–A last Thanksgiving at home.

www.thejoymenu.com

Discover more from The Joy Menu

what the hell is "creativity" anyway?
Continue reading
Sign in

76–A last Thanksgiving at home.

Driving in, I had the thought: "how many more Thanksgivings will we spend like this, a family together in our family home?"

Joey Rubin
May 22, 2023
3
Share this post

76–A last Thanksgiving at home.

www.thejoymenu.com
Share

Over the next few months, I’ll be sharing poems from a collection (tentatively entitled “Slow Business”) which I plan to publish in August. Here, I’ll provide short introductions. I’ll let you know more about the collection as it comes together. For now, know that the poems relate to the regularly scheduled programming, but come from their own creative cycle. Enjoy! - JR

In 2016, I went home for Thanksgiving. 

That had been the tradition. As my grandparents had aged and travel had become more complicated for them, we’d moved from congregating in the Bay, where a large network of my mother’s side had settled, to gathering at our house in Irvine. After they passed, people came, though not from as far, and not as many. Yet every year we came together, filled the house with our voices, and waited for the home cooked turkey and her fixings to arrive on the kitchen table, the fulcrum around which this annual reunion turned.

The Joy Menu is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

In 2016, I went home and it was busy and bustling and tense. As it had always been. 

My father had recently (abruptly) retired, and he had both turned his attention fully to making art (the living room had been converted into his studio), and (always restless, always hungry) was already talking about the next job, the next enterprise, the next project he could pitch. My mother had begun to talk about moving to Ohio – where my sister and her family lived. It was just a hazy urge, nothing concrete, nothing near a “plan:” maybe we’ll build a house, maybe we’ll buy a farm, but wouldn’t it be nice to be near the grandkids as they grow…

I was teaching and came to stay for the week. Driving in, I had the thought: how many more Thanksgivings will we spend like this, a family together in our family home. I did the math: maybe two or three. Maybe five if we were lucky and Ohio failed to lure them away. There was sadness to that. But it was a tentative, measured sadness. It wasn’t yet a deep-throated grief.

Two months later, my father received his diagnosis. Seven months later the house was sold and my parents were in Ohio. Two years later, he was dead. There would be no more Thanksgiving celebrations at home in Irvine. There would be no more Thanksgivings as a complete family. 

Sometimes we experience a knowing without actually knowing. Sometimes foreshadowing – which only makes sense later in the book – appears as intuition in our bones.

This was one such time.

Parking at Ralph’s

Perhaps the exact moment

the tumor birthed itself 

in the soft tissue of your brain

we were trying to park in the crowded

Ralph’s parking lot 

on Thanksgiving Day, pushed 

from the house by a stressed auntie 

requesting twine to string the bird, 

circling, circling, and then 

kissing with our passenger mirror 

that other mirror.  

Your expression fixed 

when the owner of the car 

lunged forward to diminish us: 

just go, you said, just go 

like some whimpering dog

microseconds before the earth

quakes. (I had asked my journal

the night before: “When does a child

become caretaker to a parent?”). 

Pops, is that why you let me drive?

Because you never let me drive.

Not even home from the DMV

the day I passed the driver’s test.


Onward,

Joey

Dad and mom in Newport Beach. The only photo I have from that trip. 2016.

The Joy Menu is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

3
Share this post

76–A last Thanksgiving at home.

www.thejoymenu.com
Share
Previous
Next
Comments
Top
New
Community

No posts

Ready for more?

© 2023 Joey Rubin
Privacy ∙ Terms ∙ Collection notice
Start WritingGet the app
Substack is the home for great writing