A lesson in gratitude

The Thanksgiving my Aunt Ethel burned down my cousin Phyllis's house

By STUART GELLER
Thanksgiving turkey 311 (photo credit: Courtesy)
Thanksgiving turkey 311
(photo credit: Courtesy)
I know that the first thing you are going to ask me is if this story is true, and I don’t blame you. Yes, it is true.
Every family has its traditions, and I come from a family of storytellers. We never get together that we don’t hear a few good tales.
Now, it came to pass at a family reunion last year that my Aunt Ethel beckoned to me and said, “Listen, Rabbi, every year when I go to temple the day after Thanksgiving, the rabbi’s Thanksgiving sermon always gets around to mentioning what happened 200 years ago. So I am going to tell you this story because this is a story about Thanksgiving because you need a good story about why we are thankful on Thanksgiving.”
She said, “Remember Phyllis’s house in Winnetka?”
Winnetka is a suburb of Chicago, and a nice one. Phyllis and her husband, Gary, had lived in Chicago for many years and moved to Winnetka with their two little boys, five and seven.
Aunt Ethel asked me if I remembered that house. Of course I remembered it. In fact, that very summer, just about everybody in Denver who could get the time off went to Chicago to see Phyllis’s new house, which was a very nice three-story house on a quiet street. As I remember it, it was mostly made out of wood and was pretty narrow.
There were three bedrooms on the second floor, and then there was another bigger sort of attic and bedroom on the third floor. And it was a pretty nice house. And though I didn’t know it then, it was sort of symbolic of family success. Phyllis was the oldest of the cousins, and thus moving up and out of Chicago, where we all came from originally, meant something good was in store for all of us.
Now, on this particular Thanksgiving Day my Aunt Ethel was in the kitchen helping make the turkey, and while she was cooking something on the stove, she spilled some grease and cleaned it up with a towel. The towel went right to the flames on the burner and caught on fire.
So my Aunt Ethel put it in the sink and poured water on it. And then she threw the wet towel all covered with grease down the laundry chute in the kitchen. And remember, those old laundry chutes were a pretty good idea. In other words, the chute went right down into the basement and all the laundry sort of piled right up there in a basket right near the washing machine. It was pretty efficient.
But the one thing my Aunt Ethel did not know was that the towel was still hot. In fact, it was still on fire. Maybe there was a cinder or spark in there someplace and the laundry chute sort of gave the pile of laundry down in the basement a chimney effect.
So after a while, the towel started burning again, and it set the laundry on fire, too. The laundry chute carried the flames right up to the third floor and burned right through the wall and set the third floor of the house on fire.
Well, they were all cooking the turkey and getting ready for Thanksgiving, which Ethel said was the hottest Thanksgiving she ever remembered in Chicago, when the people across the street called on the phone, and my Aunt Ethel answered and they said they wanted to talk to Phyllis.
Now, you don’t really think about it nowadays, but one of the things the people in the Midwest take a lot of pride in is being polite. People in the Midwest, even if they know you a long time, bend over backward not to bend over forward. They are not the sort of people to ask a lot of questions or jump to conclusions, no matter what is going on.
And do not forget, Phyllis had just moved into that house that summer, so she hardly knew the neighbors. I mean, she would see them around, they would wave to her, she would wave to them, and the kids had all played in the front yard, but they did not really know each other. Those things take time.
So the new neighbor lady said, “Well, Phyllis, I hardly know you, but I have been looking out my window and I don’t know if you know this or not, but there are flames coming out of the third story of your house!”
And Phyllis said, “Just hold the phone a minute.”
So she put the phone down in the kitchen, went out the side door of the house and looked up at the third floor, but she did not see any flames. They were coming out of the front of the house. So then Phyllis walked to the front of the house, and there was a big old fire raging at the top of the house.
Well, in those days they had not instituted 911. So Phyllis got back on the phone and said to the lady, “Do you know the phone number for the Fire Department?” The lady said she did and said that if Phyllis wanted her to, she would call – which she did.
And Phyllis and my Aunt Ethel and the two kids and Phyllis’s husband all went out on the front lawn on a pretty cold day. By the time the fire engine got there, Phyllis’s house had burnt to the ground.
So my Aunt Ethel looked up at me and said, “Now we are getting to the true meaning of Thanksgiving. You know, you have to go through something like that to understand the meaning of Thanksgiving the way I do. You will not believe this, but one of the things that we rescued from the house was the turkey! We ran back into the house and we got our coats and a few things like that. And Gary said, ‘Let’s not starve! Grab that turkey.’ Well, you will not believe this, but we grabbed the turkey and we grabbed the dishes and so forth, and they were all sitting out on the front lawn.”
She said to me, “Whenever you go and you have turkey dinner for Thanksgiving, the turkey usually is not cooked all the way through because people buy a great big turkey and they don’t have enough time to cook it. I hate to tell you, but the house burning down just added enough heat to make a perfect turkey.”
I said, “That’s it? That’s how to be thankful?” She said, “Oh, no! I am just telling you that by the way. The turkey, we ate the turkey. You know, we were sitting there on the front lawn when the mayor of Winnetka drove up, and then the United States senator, Charles Percy, and the governor of Illinois. The mayor, senator and governor all drove up to tell Gary and Phyllis how sorry they were that the house burned down.
“Well, Gary didn’t even know those people, and the United States senator invited him to Thanksgiving dinner in his own home, and so did the governor and the mayor of Winnetka.
So all three of them started to argue on the front lawn about where they would eat dinner! But the people across the street, that we hardly knew, had already invited us. They said, ‘Have your Thanksgiving dinner with us. And bring that extra turkey.’ “So since we had all these dishes on the lawn, a big turkey and all kinds of vegetables and sweet potatoes, a recipe that had been in our family for 50 years, maybe more. Well, we took all of that across the street to this neighbor that we hardly knew and we had Thanksgiving with them. And then they took us to a motel.
“The next day, senator Charles Percy called Gary to ask him how things were going and if he was having any trouble or any problems.
“And still later, Gary went to work for senator Charles Percy, all because the house burned down on Thanksgiving, but that was a lot later.
“When they woke up Friday morning, well, they did not have a house to live in because it had burnt to the ground. And Gary said to me, ‘Phyllis and I are going to go look for a new house, and you are going to stay here at the motel with the boys.’ And as he was walking out the door of the motel, he said to me, ‘Now, listen, Ethel, do not burn the motel down!’
“I said, ‘Gary, you get right back in here, I want to tell you something. Did you ever think to yourself that if I was not here to watch the two boys, you could not go look for a house? Where would you leave two little boys?
If I were you, I would say, ‘Ethel, I am thankful that you are here to watch the boys.’ “You know,” my beloved aunt said as he walked out the door a second time, “This is Thanksgiving weekend, Gary, and I will tell you something. You should be thankful for me.”
I said, “But Ethel, why to you?”
“Because,” she said, “first of all, because of me he got a bigger house; because of me he met the senator and got a better job; and finally, if I wasn’t there to watch the kids, he would not have found the new house.”
“Anything else?” I asked.
“Don’t ever forget,” she said, “inside of every tragedy is a chance to be thankful for what is left over.”
Now, that is an American Thanksgiving.