In November 2001, I had Thanksgiving dinner in a tiny, one-bedroom apartment on the outskirts of London.
That year, my brother and I were coincidentally both employed in the U.K. While I was working in the heart of the city, my brother was playing professional hockey in Romford, a large, post-industrial suburb of London that looks like the setting for "The Full Monty" or any other British film not featuring Big Ben, Parliament or Trafalgar Square.
Being half a year removed from college, I had yet to spend a significant time away from my parents' house, let alone find myself 3,000 miles away in a country that does not find it necessary to take a day off work to gorge on turkey, stuffing and gravy.
And as my attentive reader (Mom? Anyone?) might recall, Thanksgiving holds a special place in my heart, and stomach, as the best holiday of the year. Without the perennial anxiety that accompanies mandatory gift giving or the blatant commercialization of most other holidays, I had always appreciated the third Thursday of November for requiring nothing but recurring food-induced comas intermingled with a sluggish game of touch football.
Thus, the prospect of spending the holiday away from home was greeted with all the enthusiasm of, well, pretty much all of America at the news that Sarah Palin had "written" a book.
Fortunately, however, my brother's wife, Sally, was on hand to prepare her first Thanksgiving, apparently not daunted by the fact that procuring the culinary prerequisites could be difficult, considering that we were in a country where baked beans are served for breakfast and the most popular condiment is the ominously vague "brown sauce."
And while she accomplished this task in spectacular fashion, while we sat on mismatched chairs around a table that couldn't simultaneously fit the serving dishes, our plates and our elbows, I realized that along with this dinner, she was serving up a course of inspiration and that the food just underscored the magnanimity of her character.
If it was hard for me to be away from home for Thanksgiving, it must have been excruciating for Sally, for just over two months prior, one of her brothers had gone to work at the World Trade Center in Manhattan on Sept. 11.
In the weeks following, uncertainty faded and she was left, in what I can only guess was the most wrenching moment in her life, an ocean away from the rest of her family. Needless to say, I wouldn't have been surprised had she not felt like performing what I consider one of the more difficult tasks of domesticity (not an exaggeration considering that mac 'n' cheese was the extent of my culinary abilities at that point).
As my older siblings got jobs, spouses, children and responsibilities, and I managed to move to some fairly inconvenient locales, there were precious few moments to get a cup of coffee together, let alone spend three hours around a table with heaping platters of food and multiple bottles of wine.
But Thanksgiving is a reminder that no matter what else is happening in our lives, when it comes to family, the sum is greater than the parts.
And that Sally was able to conjure up one of the best, and definitely most unexpected, holidays I have ever experienced is something for which I will forever be grateful.
Jon Duval is a staff writer for the Idaho Mountain Express.
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