Our first Thanksgiving happened just less than 4 months after landing in JFK in 1991. We lived in the Bronx in the apartment on Overing St. By that time we already were pretty well set. We had furniture brought from scavenging a 1 mile radius in a daily (nightly, to be exact) routine patrol of the area. I think by that time we already had a table.
It was what we could find by the curb, furniture for garbage, and now we were in advanced stage of replacing it with better stuff... at the same curbside. We already had a TV that worked half time, a sofa, even a microwave. We already were past the hunger; my son Vadim was working as a delivery boy for a Pioneer supermarket, and daughter Inna worked as a line cook in McDonald's. I was still trying to land a dream job in newspaper delivery and was waiting for a vacant route…
We knew Thanksgiving was coming and we were excited with the idea of cooking a turkey. We now could afford a holiday, and we went to a local supermarket quite far from us, as we had a coupon for a turkey for only $0.29 a pound.
The turkey was a whopping 23-pound bird, which lasted way beyond the Thanksgiving day. We also bought cranberry and for the first time in America we bought ice cream, a symbol of prosperity, a symbol of something so decadent... something that you could live without, and spending on which felt sweet, like committing a crime....
I remember my surprise that the liquor store next door was empty, no long lines, and it was against everythhing I knew about the Holiday, but my knowledge was from the other world, and it was so far away and so different….
I was pushing the shopping card out of the store, where we grabbed the bags and went home (on foot, of course, it was a before-we-had-a-car era) and I was proud that we were no worse than other Americans around us in the store… all those Hispanics, Russians, Koreans, Albanians…
I remember sitting in front of the oven basting the turkey to keep it moist, and after over 3 hours the surprise over white meat, dry and tasteless... surprise over sweet cranberry with meat, so strange for us, unprepared to such combination… but it was all irrelevant. This was our first Thanksgiving, and we were thankful for so many things… we were overwhelmed by so many things, and number one on that list was that we made it here, we were in the United States, and it was for real, and life was only going to be better…
And it was…
And it is…
* Image courtesy of John-Morgan via FLickr.com
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