Here's to you, Frank O'Harris

We celebrate family and food. And mindfulness. Don't forget how good we have it.

This week’s FreeForAll comes courtesy of the one day of the year designed to remind us how good we have it, and to never let it go.

Consider contributing to the health and well-being of The Morning Line via paid subscription, $8/month or $80/year. And have a mindful Thanksgiving.

With apologies to Brent Musburger. . .

You are looking live at the view from the home office of my son, aka The Erstwhile Kid Down the Hall, in beautiful Brooklyn, NY, USA. It’s a real Rear Window sorta set-up, a view that could launch a thousand novels. Put it this way: Everyone on the block has a view. Few have curtains.

The front of The Erstwhile One’s 3rd-floor apartment faces the street. The back reveals what used to be an alley, I’m guessing, but is now sort of an urban jungle with a fence bisecting the green space.

It is a cozy spot in a decent neighborhood and just a couple subway rides from anything one could ever want to do, see, experience. In Cincinnati, you can get mortgage payments on a 4-bedroom house on a quarter acre for what Kelly pays in rent each month. You cannot attend an Edward Hopper exhibit in the morning, take a walk through Central Park at noon and see Hamilton on Broadway at night.

We are here, Kerry and I, for Thanksgiving.

Being with family on this most gracious of days isn’t just a chance to get together, eat, drink and watch football. It’s more of a commandment. Thanksgiving is an essentially spiritual occurrence, intended to fill us not just with stuffing and Jell-O salad (thank god) but with gratitude. The soul swells on Thanksgiving Day.

On this one day a year, if you’re lucky, you feel you have a place. You belong, you are welcomed, you are loved. Upon crossing some undefined age threshold, it occurs to you that this isn’t a forever situation, and so you live the moment for all it gives. The name of the holiday says it all.

Thanksgiving.

If only, in these tattered days, we possessed the gratitude of Thanksgiving all the time. Its spirit, its grace, its ask for mindfulness. The mountains we could move if we all did the pushing.

You’re wandering, Doc.

Thanksgiving isn’t clouded by commerce (Christmas). It’s not about the universal worshipping of one god (Easter) or the celebration of the birth of a nation (Independence Day). It’s about sitting at a long table, feeling blessed in our situation, and saying the blessing out loud.

Not Irish.

A story:

Elsye Daugherty was not a football fan. It was years before she realized a certain Pittsburgh Steelers running back was not Irish. My mother believed Frank O’Harris to be a fine football player and a suitable representative of the old sod.

One Thanksgiving in the mid-1970s or so, Elsye made a typically fabulous feast, loaded with essentials, the result of an entire day’s work in the kitchen. She felt the kinship powerfully, because Thanksgiving was family, and family was everything.

So imagine her joy when my mother saw an extra chair at the dinner table, upon which sat a 20-inch television set.

It was Redskins-Cowboys which, in our house, was the same thing as a holy war. Think Bengals-Steelers. It wasn’t that my dad and I didn’t appreciate the real meaning of the day. It was that the Redskins were playing the Cowboys on CBS.

Elsye Daugherty threw a fit worthy of an Irish wake for a certain Frank O’Harris. At least that’s how I choose to recall it. Pots were used as cymbals, serving dishes made fine snare drums. Everyone at the table was silent, so as to better appreciate the symphony emanating from the kitchen.

Hell hath no fury like a sweet potato scorned.

I don’t remember how we settled the thing, only that thankfully no one died. I might have come away with a permanent forehead indentation, the result of a turkey leg thrown at high velocity from short range. But, no big deal.

Nor do I recall if we ever again invited Mr. TV to partake in the rites of another Thanksgiving. Something tells me we were allowed the TV, but that would have involved Elsye acquiescing. She wasn’t especially good at that. It wasn’t among her multitude of skills. What I remember clearly is, every Thanksgiving we were together after that, we laughed about the TV sitting at the table.

Gag me with a spoon

Certain truths remain self evident:

Never eat the Jell-O salad with the carrot bits in it, trapped like mosquitoes in amber;

In the name of giving thanks, never forget to slip the dog a big chunk of green bean casserole;

Heroically maintain a hunger strike, when applied to aspic. Aspic is the Lord’s way of reminding us that even Thanksgiving has its faults and should be forgiven.

Ask the cook if you can invite the TV.

The morals of this story are, (1) Pick your spots when choosing to watch football on TV, (2) get creative when ditching the carrot-infused Jell-O and. . .

And (3) hold this day tightly, never let it go and remember the bigger notion that comes with it, as sure as pumpkin pie: Be grateful for all you’ve got, realize how lucky we are and take that gratitude into tomorrow and every day thereafter.

Now pass me the turkey and keep that aspic away from me.

Don’t pass the aspic