The most memorable Thanksgiving I ever experienced wasn’t spent around a table with family, stuffing my face with turkey, which I don’t particularly like, and fixings.
I didn’t digest that amazing comfort food sitting in front of a television set, watching some exciting, iconic football game.
There weren’t any visits to the neighbors to deliver one of my mother’s famous Apple Jack pumpkin pies, based on a recipe Lucy had found in an old issue of the Bulletin, and preserved like a family heirloom.
The most memorable Thanksgiving I ever experienced was spent alone, thousands of miles away from Philly accents and the Wanamaker Light Show, in a beautiful place that wasn’t home, at a time when all I wanted was to be close to my father, eating that disgusting cranberry sauce he loved, and I hated.
This was the last Thanksgiving he would spend on Earth, and I wasn’t with him.
It was 1981, and I was a few months into my junior year in Paris. When I signed up for the program, it seemed like a dream come true.
I was a French major at Bryn Mawr, and so it made sense that I would spend the two semesters abroad, or so I told myself. I could probably have gotten as good an education in my field by simply hanging out with Madame Catherine Lafarge, the legendary French scholar at my alma mater.
But my father was the one who convinced me that this was the chance of a lifetime, and that since he was willing to foot the bill, I had no choice but to go.
And then, four months before I was supposed to get on that plane from JFK, my father was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer.
They gave him less than a year to live. I planted my size 6 feet on the yellow linoleum kitchen floor and said, “I’m not going.”
Ted Flowers had stared down the Klan in Mississippi in 1967, but he was no match for his eldest child. I stared lasers through him and announced that I was not abandoning him.
Violetta in La Traviata and Mimi in La Boheme could not have managed to summon more pathos and melodrama than Christine from Havertown.
And yet, I did get on that plane. My father told me that he refused to let me miss this amazing opportunity just to stay home and watch him get chemo and radiation.
Besides, he said, he had four other kids. He could spare one for a few months, and he’d be here when I got back.
So I went to Paris. It was the longest plane ride of my life, both figuratively and literally.
There were layovers in Brussels, and then a long bus ride across the border into France. But during the entire trip, I sobbed.
I had a suspicion that I would never see my robust, red-headed, freckled hero again. And in a way, I was right.
The first few months kept me occupied with making friends and trying to figure out why the French I spoke in America was a far cry from the language used by these arrogant, unfriendly Parisians.
It was as if I were talking in Aramaic, from the way they refused to understand what I was saying. Each one of them replied in perfect English, even when I made attempts to converse en français.
But I had already made up my mind that I was going to go home at the end of the semester, so I wouldn’t have to deal with these people for much longer.
But before that happened, I had to get through Thanksgiving. The French celebrate Christmas, and they have a version of the New Year (Le Reveillon) and they even have a bizarre twist on Halloween.
But Thanksgiving is a uniquely American holiday, and for the Parisians, it was just another day among the rest.
I couldn’t find a turkey if my life depended on it. There were no pumpkins.
The only Indians that I noticed were from Calcutta, and other foreign students.
So I bought myself an apple and dressed it up in paper feathers. I found an apple tart and pretended it was my mother’s heirloom, booze soaked delight.
I ate a sandwich au jambon. And I cried, because I didn’t even have enough money to call home.
But the next day, I got a letter, one that had taken its good time in getting to me. Ironically, it had been sent a couple of months before, from my father, on one of those feather-light aerogrammes.
Somehow, it had gotten lost in transit. And it held a message for this firstborn Flowers child.
In it, Teddy said that he was proud of me for agreeing to an adventure when the farthest I had been from home before had been Seaside Heights, N.J.
He promised me that he would be there when I got back, speaking perfect French — he wasn’t aware that I had just told my host family that I knew a lot of prostitutes, instead of Protestants — and that he loved me with the entirety of his heart.
I lost it, of course.
And I did get to see him one more time, a month before he died.
He had held on for me, although he didn’t recognize me when I walked through the door, overcome with painkillers and trapped in a body that no longer worked.
But he was there, and I was able to hold him.
You might wonder why this Thanksgiving stands out in memory. I used to wonder that myself.
But as I approach my 64th birthday, I have come to the realization that absence makes the value of those we cherish even more powerful.
In that absence, we feel the heavy weight of their importance, and that is when the truest gratitude swells in our hearts.
I hope that you all have that weight in your own.
This column was originally published in the Delco Times.
