Thanksgiving 2017

When I was a boy, this question never could have found its way into my brain: Will this be my last Thanksgiving? In childhood—for most people (for lucky people)—thoughts of last are as remote as, well, as that book report that’s due next week. (Next week is forever—I’ve got plenty of time to read that book!)

My boyhood Thanksgivings were ... astonishing. No Vegas gambler has ever been so lucky. Born on November 11, 1944, I was too young to remember my first one (which, coincidentally, was also on the 23rd). I see from my mom’s hospital bill that the 23rd was the final day my mom was in the hospital with me—St. Mary’s Enid, Oklahoma. So ... were we there all day? Or home? Whatever--my first Thanksgiving dinner was you-know-what.

Only weeks old, I could not know, either, that my father—who didn’t yet know I was even born—was in Europe with the U. S. Army. World War II. Dad was a chaplain, and one of his grim tasks—and one of the few aspects of the war he would ever talk about—was having to write letters to families to tell them of the worst loss they could imagine. He saved carbon copies of those letters for years—for decades—always, he said, in case a family should lose theirs and want another.

Dad was something. He died shortly after Thanksgiving in 1999. We drove out to Pittsfield, Mass., to see him in his final days. The nursing home. You know ...  Thanksgiving was on November 25, He died on November 30. He was 86. Just thirteen years older than I am now.

Most of my boyhood Thanksgivings we spent with my maternal grandparents, Edwin and Alma Osborn, in Enid. (During my earliest years we lived upstairs in an apartment above their house. So my first Thanksgiving at home would have been there.)

They were marvels, those two, my Osborn grandparents. (Both our son, Steve, and I share “Osborn” as a middle name.) He was an ordained Disciples of Christ minister (he baptized me), had served as the minister at University Place Christian Church in Enid—and was on the faculty of the Bible College at Phillips University (RIP) there in Enid. He and my grandmother were two of the kindest human beings I’ve ever known. Grandpa published books on religious subjects—Christian worship was his specialty. (You can check him out on the Internet. Link to a site.)

After we left Enid in the summer of 1956 and moved to Hiram, Ohio, we spent some wonderful Thanksgivings with my parents’ dear friends, the Sharps and the Rossers. Dad was teaching at Hiram College (1956-66), and Paul Sharp was the college president (Mom and Dad had known the Sharps, Paul and Rose, since their student days back at Phillips); Ed Rosser taught chemistry at Hiram (I would take one of his classes later on—got a “B,” which was kind of a gift: I was a dunce); Ruth Rosser, his wife, taught, as my mom did, at James A. Garfield HS in nearby Garrettsville, Ohio.

The Sharps had three children (as the Dyers did), and we were close in age; Marcia, the Rossers’ only child, was my classmate in the Hiram Schools. We all liked one another—maybe “loved” is a better word? Each year we would assemble at someone’s house (there was a rotation) and spend the day eating, talking, eating, laughing, eating, watching football, eating ... napping ... thinking all was forever ...

Some years—when the weather cooperated—we would play what we called our Annual Bowl Game—touch football out in the yard.. It wasn’t as fierce as that game in Wedding Crashers, but I would be lying if I denied that there was some ... competition out there on the gridiron! (Link to video of that scene.)

I look back on those years so fondly—they seemed, then, to have about them the aura of always. Yet I know there were only about a half-dozen of them.

Later, in the 1966-67 academic year—the Sharps were gone; my parents had joined them out in Des Moines, Iowa, at Drake University (where Dr. Sharp was the president); I had begun my teaching career in Aurora. Just before Thanksgiving, I got a call from Mrs. Rosser: Would I like to join them for Thanksgiving? Would I! I think I wept as I hung up the phone. I’m about to start again, right now. Such a kind, wonderful family. They knew I was alone ... and knew that wasn’t good, especially on Thanksgiving.

Joyce and I married on December 20, 1969. (We had met just months before, in July, in a summer grad school class at Kent State.) We were spending all our free time together that fall, so I’m pretty sure we were together for that holiday. But where? With her folks in Akron? With mine in Des Moines? I wish I could remember. We did spend some Thanksgivings with her family, some with mine. (Soon, both became “ours.”) We tried to spend one major holiday (Thanksgiving, Christmas) with her folks, one with mine. It was hard—700 miles from Kent (where we were living) to Des Moines. Seven hundred miles back.

Joyce’s folks were superior human beings. Once they adapted to the realization that she was going to marry me, they accepted me without reservation (well, without any evident reservation!), and we spent many wonderful Thanksgivings with the Coynes (her family)—and with her relatives who lived nearby, in and around Firestone Park in Akron. They were all so kind to me—and they adored Joyce.

Later on, when my two brothers, Dick and Dave, bought an old farmhouse out in the Berkshires (in Becket, Mass.), we often drove out there to be with them—sometimes in weather so bad that only an idiot (Daniel Osborn Dyer) would attempt such a drive. We did this many years—until that 550-mile drive (each way) became Too Much for poor old me, until health (mine) said, No way.

Those were great times in Becket. My brothers, their families, my parents—all swarming together in that old farmhouse, destroying the kitchen, laughing, telling (for the 1000th time) embarrassing family stories about one another (I somehow seemed the butt of most of them—but, then again—I was a butt for a long, long, long time), watching bad TV, going out to see worse movies ...

One year, alone (our son in college and elsewhere), Joyce and I tried going to a little place up near Lake Erie to have Thanksgiving. It was some sort of package deal—room, dinner, etc.

We hated it. Headed out as soon as we has eaten the last slice of (bad) turkey. Never again, we said.

In recent years we’ve been having a Thanksgiving dinner at our place. Often our son and his family are able to come (they, too, have to deal with that complicated in-law choreography). We love it. We bake and roast and whatever for a week before. And the food is great, of course. Better: seeing our son, his wife, our dear grandsons (12 and 8).

They’ll all swarm into our house tomorrow. We can’t wait. We love them all, boundlessly.

When you’re younger, you’re of course unaware that any moment you draw breath could be the last one. Death—that’s for other people, right?

I’m about to undergo a complicated medical procedure to see if I can wrench a few more months (years?) out of this fragile frame of mine. It’s tentatively scheduled for January. We’re all hopeful—as optimistic as latter-year cynicism and realism permit.

And meanwhile? For me, every single day has becomeThanksgiving.

May yours be as wonderful as mine ...