The story made me feel both thankful and a little guilty. We had so much more than my father did when he was a boy, but we would probably be considered poor by today's standards. We lived in a two-room basement apartment until I was 13. My parents slept on a pull-out couch in the living room, while my sister and I slept in one bed in the tiny bedroom, and we shared a single bathroom with several other families in the apartment building. But we always had enough food to eat, and we never missed a Thanksgiving meal. Television was a less pernicious influence then in fostering a sense of deprivation than it is today. There were many working-class characters on TV in the 1950s, and I could identify with the shabby little apartment that Ralph and Alice Kramden shared on "The Honeymooners," while aspiring to a room of my own like Betty's in "Father Knows Best." Still, like most kids, I envied what some of my friends possessed. My father's stories helped put everything in perspective.
My father died in 1978, but every Thanksgiving I remember his story as if it were my own. Like the cranberries that I now cook from scratch, it gives the feast its bittersweet edge to remind me how truly thankful we all should be every day of the year.