by Megan Stoddard

Created on: November 17, 2009

The first time I spent Thanksgiving away from home, away from my family, I wore a sundress to dinner. The turkey was cooked on the grill outside. My hosts said everyone in Phoenix grilled the turkey. Their neighbors, a couple and their nine-year-old daughter, came to dinner bearing brisket of beef, because none of them like turkey. The girl brought her Scattergories game, and we all played. I had never heard of that game before. And we had chocolate cake for dessert, which made it feel, to me, much less like Thanksgiving.

"Sharon" had been my mother's roommate in college. She, sometimes alone, sometimes with her husband, "David," had visited occasionally as I was growing up. Both their sons were somewhat older than me, and if I'd met them at all before, it was when I was too young to remember. The visits took place when Sharon was traveling to our city for a medical convention, and sometimes David, too (they were both doctors).

So they were much like extended family, relatives I'd seen very little of, but could still claim kinship with. When Sharon heard that I was going to school in Arizona, in Prescott, two hours from Phoenix, she invited me for Thanksgiving.

Their son "Jason" was there, as was his girlfriend, "Ruth." Jason, it turned out, could not open his mouth without teasing people. Mostly, he teased his parents. And he would constantly build on what he'd said before, making statements that tied to something someone had said a couple of hours ago.

Ruth was a graduate student. She spoke seven languages. Sharon said it was an interesting coincidence, because in college she and my mother had a friend with the same name, who was also multilingual. My mother had talked about that Ruth a lot, so that part wasn't news to me.

Years later, I met someone else, now a friend I correspond with regularly, who reminds me very much of Jason's Ruth. But they don't have the same name, and my newer friend is ten years younger than me, would have been in grade school that Thanksgiving. And since then I've had a boss who, like Jason, couldn't open his mouth without teasing everyone in sight and building on what had been said before. Coincidences abound.

However, I will never entertain the notion of Thanksgiving without pumpkin pie. That, to me, is Thanksgiving. Turkey I can take or leave - in fact, I am a vegetarian now, as is my sister and several of my friends - but not pumpkin pie. Thanksgiving requires the smell of baking squash, and the cinnamon-nutmeg-ginger-cloves taste blended with slightly sweet squash and crunchy crust.

Ruth and Jason are married now. Sharon and David are retired, but they do keep in touch. My mother and Sharon get together every few years.

When I remember that Thanksgiving, what I feel is peace. It was like coming home, even though that house in Phoenix had never been my home, even though I was visiting people I had, in truth, barely gotten to know. It felt like they were family.

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