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The Moth
Lily Berman & Jeffery Rudell: Thanksgiving Stories
00:16:12
A special Thanksgiving episode of The Moth Podcast: A four-year-old decides that Thanksgiving dinner is the perfect time to give herself a haircut and after a citified family moves to a working farm, the chaos comes to a head at Thanksgiving.
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- [00:01]
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- [01:31]
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Dan Kennedy
Welcome to the Moth Podcast. I'm Dan Kennedy. Happy Thanksgiving everybody. We have a very special Moth podcast today. Thanksgiving episode for you this week with a couple of Moth Thanksgiving stories. But first I wanted to read a few of these. We reached out to you on Twitter and Facebook and asked what was your most story worthy Thanksgiving, Todd said. The first Thanksgiving after my beloved grandfather died, the whole family had a miserable dinner at the local Howard Johnson's hotel dining room. Well, we've started with a dose of reality. Maybe that shouldn't have been the opener. Jenny said, my dog bit my sister. Then my cousin got in my face about it and I told her to f off. It just says ha ha ha. It's funny now. I swear it sounded like Jenny is convincing everybody else. It's funny to look back on. She's like, trust me, you Guys, it's hilarious to look back on. Rebecca said the Thanksgiving. My then boyfriend and I tried to get engaged and were shouted down by his parents when we tried to tell them. That's. That is some class A parenting, I have to say. If you don't like the boyfriend and they're trying to announce the news and you're just like Lisa says. When I was a kid living in New York in the 1960s, we would watch the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade from the comfort of my dad's office. Floor to ceiling windows. Right along the parade route, we'd see the giant balloons float right past us. We'd get apple cider and those boxes of animal crackers that look like a circus train. The tradition ended the year we got a color tv. Ah, see that? Everyone blames the Internet for the kids staying inside. It was happening back with the invention of color tv. Okay, so stories about Thanksgiving. Here we go. Our first story this week comes to us from our Moth Story Slam series in Denver, and it's told by Lily Berman. Here's Lily.
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Lily Berman
Okay, so my grandmary was the perfect southern belle. She chose the name Granmary because her name was Mary, but she always delighted in the little cousins calling her Grand Tucky because she came from Kentucky. She married her sweet, not high school sweetheart. She met him when she was 14. And she worked for maybe one year of her life until her days became filled with being the president of her women's club three times and forcing my mother and my aunt to do cotillion in the hopes that they would come out as debutantes, which is especially hilarious if you've ever met my mother. And she never washed her own hair. She would go every week to the beauty parlor to have them coif it into this preposterous mass of red curls. My childhood was very different than the childhood where my mom grew up in Kentucky. My mom is a neuroscientist and my parents both worked a lot. And so their role was if you weren't physically injuring yourself or physically injuring your siblings, then everything else kind of went. And my sister later became an artist. And so there's these amazing pictures of the clothes that she dressed herself in because we dressed ourselves when we were physically capable of doing so. All these mixed matches of patterns and colors. And so when I was four years old, I had golden curly blonde hair down to my shoulders and these gigantic bangs. And grandmary came to visit us for Thanksgiving and my mom was terrified because suddenly her perfect mom was stepping into her imperfect world and seeing her imperfect children and imperfect house condition and all of these things on a holiday, no less. So she was really stressed out and she was very in tune with the meal and everyone that was sitting at the table. And I went off to go to the bathroom and I remember I was standing in my parents bathroom on the right vanity looking at these bangs, just staring them down because I hated those bangs. I hated them in my face. I hated everything about them. And now was the time when I was going to take a stand and I was not going to talk to an adult about it and I was not going to find a barrette. I opened the drawer and I took out the scissors and I hacked off my bangs and I held them in my hand and I felt so victorious, like. Like this huge weight was lifted off my shoulders or my forehead. And so I set them on the counter and I sauntered back to the table where my mom is sitting and turns over and looks in horror as her four year old daughter comes back not just with her bangs cut off, but with giant chunks hacked out of her head down to the scalp. And my mom is a very logical, rational person. She's a scientist. So normally she would just say, what am I going to do with this? I will cut her hair short. This is fine. And it would have been fine, but Gran Mary was there to see this. And so she spanked me for probably the only time in my life. And I was very aware that I ruined Thanksgiving and I was an embarrassment to my southern belle grandmother. As we grew up, we would go to visit her in Kentucky and it remained very clear how much I didn't fit in her world. Like all of those things your parents teach you about manners and proper behavior, I never really learned. So I took a shower and just threw the towel on the ground. And grandmary came down and said, you should hang up your, because otherwise how can your mom wash it for you? And I thought, ha ha, she doesn't wash my stuff. And you don't have to wash towels because you're clean when you use them. But her house was such a treat. It was this time capsule of 1970 or so. She lived in the same place since my mom was in high school to when she passed away recently. And in the hallway there were pictures of my mom and my aunt getting married in that hallway because. Because they both got married in that house. And in the kitchen there was this mosaic of all of these photographs of us throughout all this time in our lives. And my sister and I, when we went there, we would go through her drawers because she had all these magnificent knick knacks and treasures from times past. And so we were sort of going through our treasure hunt when grandma called me up and she said, hey, I want to show you something. And she produced this envelope and she opened it up and. And there were 4 inches of perfect golden curly hair with a rubber band around it. And I said, what is that? And she said it's your hair from when you cut it off at Thanksgiving. And I said this is like 10 years later or something like that. And I said, why did you keep that? And she said there was all this commotion and everyone was upset. And so I went to the bathroom to see what had happened and I saw it there on the counter and it was just so perfect, I couldn't leave it there. And so she bundled it up with a rubber band and she put it in an envelope and she kept it all those years. And I looked at that hair and I looked at those photographs of me growing up and awkwardly growing out of that little boy's haircut into a bull haircut, into some semblance of a fashionable haircut. And I realized that more than being her embarrassment, I was really her treasure. And I never had bangs again. Thank you.
- [09:18]
Dan Kennedy
Lily Behrman lives in Denver Colorad surrounded by breathtaking nature and the most wonderful community. She dedicates this story to her ever graceful grandmary who passed away in 2013. Lily is a non professional performer grateful to have found a way to fulfill her lifelong desire to perform. So we've got a couple more responses to the question what was your most story worthy Thanksgiving? Lydia said, as a kid, our family dog got a hold of the thawing turkey. Only my mother saw it and washed it off and cooked it. Anyway, no one found out till much later. And then she just says ew with a lot of W's. It's kind of weird. The mom just told everyone after they ate it, that's a little strange. She's like, hey, you guys like the turkey? Cool. Our dog drug it around. Donna says, the year I was 8, I had a wiggly loose tooth in front. I stood at a full length mirror wiggling the bloody mess up close, fascinated with the gore. I kept jiggling it until it was dangling by a thread. And then bang. The grossness got to be too much. I fainted. Next thing I knew, I was laying on the sofa covered in a blanket, watching the Thanksgiving Day parades. The rest of the family came over and laughed about it all night. That is pretty awesome. There's nothing like grossing yourself out so much that you faint on Thanksgiving. Okay, our second story is a moth classic. We've dug deep into the archives here at the office. This is from Jeffrey Rudel. Here's Jeffrey.
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Jeffrey Rudel
So my last Thanksgiving ended at exactly five minutes after five on the fourth Thursday of November, 34 years ago. Let me explain. Both of my parents were lower middle class people with upper lower class educations. My father was a foreman in a paper mill. My mother was a bank teller. We lived in a split level house in a subdivision that went bankrupt shortly after they bought into it. Inexplicably, In January of 1974, my father came home and announced to my mother that he had sold everything and bought a farm 60 miles away. The farm turned out to be 80 acres of untilled clay, a heap of rusting equipment, and two Holstein cows. They argued until my mother agreed to pack up everything and move everything, including her prized set of chartreuse colored Russell Wright crystal. Within a month, my father had built a chicken coop, gotten the tractor fixed, and purchased a bull. The bull arrived and went straight to work. Now the next nine months went as you might expect, which is to say, farming is not for amateurs. So any mistakes that could be made were made, beginning with breeding cows. In March, our first cow went into labor and calved on Thanksgiving at 4:00 in the morning. This being Michigan and a particularly cold season in our unheated barn, it died less than an hour later. Now, seeing his assets frozen on the barn floor drove my father to take desperate steps to sort of protect his remaining investment. So he covered the floor of our family room with a large plastic tarp, put down a bed of straw, and brought the remaining cow into the house to have its calf. By noon, both mother and calf were warm and sleeping in the room next to our kitchen. My father put a bale of straw in front of the doorway between the two rooms to keep them in place. Now, while we were tending to the calves, my mother was in the kitchen banging pots and pans and muttering about it being a family room, not a maternity ward sort of thing. Now, every Thanksgiving it was my mother's custom to remove from her china cabinet one small pale green crystal cordial glass into which she would pour a single jigger of sherry to sip while she cooked. At no other time did my mother drink, and to the best of my knowledge, no other piece of crystal was ever used. Now she loved this crystal. She used to brag that that crystal was the only thing she had that wasn't second rate or secondhand. So the afternoon goes on. Relatives arrive. My grandmother makes a comment about what is that awful smell, but a sharp glance from my mother is enough to keep her from making it a second time. At 5:00 exactly, Turkey is put on the table. We all sit down to dinner and my grandfather says grace. Now, while God is being distracted by my grandfather, a lesser spirit overcomes the calf and it leaps over the bale of straw and comes charging into the kitchen and crashes into the table. What happens next happens really fast. My mother screams. She grabs her cordial glass, stands up, knocking over her chair in the process. My father, more startled by my mother's screams than anything, sort of half stands, half lunges at the calf, which by now has its nose in his plate. I will never forget that slow motion look of horror on my mother's face as she watches my father rise a little bit and reach for, but not quite reach equilibrium before falling backward into the china cabinet. Somehow, somehow, my father escaped injury, but every single piece of crystal shattered. Everything save the one glass in my mother's hand. Now, for a child watching all of this unfold, it was fantastic. But that was our last Thanksgiving together, and for the remainder of their marriage, that glass sat on my mother's dressing room table with her wedding ring in it for all the years in between. On the fourth Thursday of every November, my mother took great pleasure in preparing a dinner of roasted veal. Thank you.
- [15:30]
Dan Kennedy
Jeffrey Rudel is a paper artist and writer known both for his extraordinary one of a kind paper creations and for his easy online craft tutorials. He has another story called under the Influence, which is included in the Moth book if you want to check that out. Jeffrey lives and works in New York City. Thanks to all of you for listening and we hope you have a story worthy and safe and not unhappy Thanksgiving.
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Barnes and Noble Advertiser
Dan Kennedy is the author of the books Loser Goes First, Rock On An American Spirit. He's also a regular host and performer with the Moth.
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Dan Kennedy
The Moth Podcast is produced by Whitney Jones. Moth events are recorded by Argo Studios in New York City, supervised by Paul Ruest. The Moth Podcast and the Moth Radio Hour are presented by prx, the Public Radio Exchange, helping make public radio more public@prx.org.