Starting with airport traffic, then the usual arguments among family members over turkey, and finally the running of the bulls into every shopping mall across America.
Are we having fun yet?
Personally, I love and embrace the notion of hosting friends for Thanksgiving Day dinner. I view it all like a scientific process, beginning with the compilation of necessary cooking ingredients. I start prepping and chopping and baking on Tuesday. If you plan your time accordingly, cooking for that holiday should not be complicated. The key is to keep your dishwasher going. Over the course of three days, mine is running non-stop.
For me, the so-called "Black Friday" is one where I put my kitchen back in order. I rarely leave the house and will usually bury myself on the couch with a movie or a book. The fact that my friends and I have mercifully given up the tradition of swapping Christmas presents allows me to stay far from the department stores until sometime in January.
So the day after Thanksgiving is essentially a quiet one for me. But I do remember one a long while ago. A very special memory.
At a White Castle.
I will explain as we fondly remember that hamburger joint which still exists to some degree. I mean, you can buy the frozen variety in your super market.
Now, the White Castle of my youth still sits in the very spot where I left it. On the corner of Allerton Avenue and Boston Post Road in the Bronx, with the grills still cooking up those bizarre sliders of chopped meat, onion bits, and dill pickles. This was the place of many good childhood memories.
And one lasting and final one from my adult life.
I don't remember how old I was when I first sampled that White Castle. Maybe when I was five or six or seven. But, most likely, I was in the back seat of some Buick as I anxiously awaited my father to roll down the driver's side window and give his order to some chick on roller skates. Yep, she was probably a car hop who would be rolling back to us in five minutes with a tray full of goodies. Next to getting pizza at Sorrento's underneath the White Plains Road elevated tracks near 233rd Street in the Bronx, White Castle was my favorite place to "eat out."
The combined flavor of meat patties with five holes punched into them and those fried onions was sheer heaven to me. The sign on the building said "Buy 'Em by the Sack" and we did. They were so small that I could wolf down five or six in one sitting. We sat there in the car, constructing a dinner table out of the dashboard or maybe the back seat. It was okay to get a little sloppy and those little onion bits would turn up on the leather interior days after the meal had been consumed.
My father would relate to me that this White Castle tradition had been handed down from a previous generation. When he was a kid, they also got White Castle burgers, although I'm guessing it was a little harder to work the crank on the window that was needed to hold up the dinner tray. Then, as he grew up, White Castle was the place to go after dances and movies with your dates. I'd sit there hearing the stories, surveying the parking lot for any strands of history that hadn't been yet tucked away into a dusty book on a shelf. This very drive-in restaurant had obviously acted as a very connective thread in the fabric of my family.
After a while, we stopped going and I completely forgot what a White Castle Hamburger tasted like. Sure, there was one right across the street from Fordham University where I went to college, but we never went there. We said they sold "murder burgers," not so much for the food quality but more because it frequently was the site of some robberies at gun point.
Yeah, White Castle disappeared from my world almost as quickly as it had appeared.
I flip the calendar pages ahead a number of years. My father's prostate cancer had re-emerged and nestled in the bone of his leg. Things were winding down for Dad, but he opted for a weekly chemo treatment anyway. Usually, one of his cronies would pick him up and drive him every Friday for whatever injection he needed to have.
So, getting back to the title of today's Memory Drawer, it was the Friday of Thanksgiving weekend and I was off. I decided to give Dad's buddies the week off. I'd do the honors of acting as driver for the day. It was the least I could do for his pals who had so diligently helped him over the years.
As I helped him out of the doctor's office and into the car, I wondered what was next in the weekly routine. Even when he was ill, my father was always all about a consistent schedule of events. I asked him what happens next.
"Well, we usually go get something to eat."
Where?
"White Castle."
I was perplexed. There wasn't one nearby in Mount Vernon.
"No, we go to the one down on Allerton. Where we used to go."
Oh. All the way down there, I thought.
Yes, all the way down. And I shouldn't have questioned it for a single moment.
My father and I sat one more time in that parking lot. The car hops were gone, but I brought the food out of the restaurant. And we chomped down on five or six sliders as if the years had morphed all together into a single second.
I didn't know it that day, but it would be the very last meal I would share with my father. Indeed, it was also the very last good memory I would keep of him.
When I went back to work after his death several months later, my friends in the office walked in and said they wanted to do something for me. They brought in a wrapped frame. It contained a colored sketch of one of the first White Castle restaurants. I had obviously mentioned the significance at some point.
An odd way to commemorate my father? Really it was the only and...best way.
The artwork still hangs in my New York apartment. For some reason, I never moved it to California. I should. That way I could look at on the day after Thanksgiving.
Dinner last night: Spaghetti with olive oil and shrimp at Gio Cucina.
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