November 28, 1963
By: Harry Bauld
Yesterday is not ours to recover.
–LBJ, Thanksgiving Address, 1963
No turkey, this or any year. An Italian house, for god’s sake, an Italian
neighborhood, as-yet-unhyphenated Americans. First as always
two platters of antipasto big as manhole covers with provolone
sharp enough to make you bark. A lake of escarole soup.
Then the deep casserole like the blue catholic bathtub
in the postage stamp of a front yard, the Virgin of Lasagna.
In the ricotta she (the Neapolitan nonna, not Jesus’ mother)
puts the secret pinch of cinnamon from a southeast Asian land
none of us can find on a map, where on my 8th birthday
a monk lights himself on fire for reasons none of us can grasp.
Then the steaming Alp of sausage and steak pizzaola
braised for five hours, and vinegary Valpolicella in jelly glasses,
the white tablecloth bloodied with their sour rings. At the end,
as if commanded by The Bible,
exactly seven desserts, all revelations,
like the ricotta cheesecake light and sweet as false hope.
All that week in third grade, to understand gratitude
and what Miss Conlon, when she takes her finger out of her nose,
calls our roots, we have studied the first Thanksgiving,
and after a couple of sips (and then a secret few more)
of the water-and-wine allowed kids on holidays I could swear
I see Squanto not at some distant badly drawn textbook pilgrim table
but right here at ours—a local exiled in his own home, after all,
he understands dislocations and longings.
My Little League team, fielding at every position but mine
boys with names like Bucci, Semenza, and Macarelli,
is called the Braves. Nonna always cooks as if she expects
the bus with the high school football team on their way back
from losing the Thanksgiving game to break down on Summer Street
and stomp in, huge and hopeless and famished in America,
the American houses closed up behind their white American shingles,
Americans picking sadly at their white puritan food–
though I don’t know where she gets this idea since everyone else
in South Medford comes from the same five towns in Italy
via East Boston. Perhaps from television,
the black-and-white wink of its sleepless assimilating dream.
So having Squanto here, toasting America, it’s no surprise,
she’s ready, and in her house he’s more than welcome,
he can pass: the nose, the dark shoe of his skin, the vowel
at the end of the name–probably Sicilian,
maybe “from over to Revere,” his English at least as good
as Uncle Pat’s–maybe a grace note of accent, the odd broken syllable–
though somehow tonier than ours, something more shapely and formal
in the consonants. Maybe from the old country, a family
with a white-washed stone house on the Mediterranean shore
of our ancestral past, and thinking of these similarities and synchronicities
allows us not to acknowledge his true old country lies
under the curb outside, runway for our Ford Fairlanes and Chuck Taylors.
All language is gratuitous when Nonna brings out the baked eggplant
sliced thin as maple leaves, so tender we cut it with a spoon,
and Squanto, like the rest of us, tucks into each course
with gratitude. Afterward, coffee and sambuca for Squanto
in the parlor as we sink down into the stuffed and televised daze of football
from New York--no Patriots yet, in those days--padded faceless men
crashing dutifully together, and a speech by the new white leader
(sworn-in Friday on an airplane) about moving on from grief and hatred to civil
rights, saying our factories flourish, we live in peace, our system
has passed a great test, in a slow heavy accent unfamiliar to Squanto’s ear and ours,
from somewhere south of the feast of lost futures whose courses
I am now thankful no one’s nonna will have to prepare.
Harry Bauld graduated from Medford High School in Massachusetts and studied art history at Columbia University where he was twice All-Ivy shortstop and broke Lou Gehrig’s records. Unfortunately they were his academic records. He was selected by Matthew Dickman for inclusion in Best New Poets 2012 (University of Virginia Press) and his poems have won the New Millennium Writings Award, the Milton Kessler Poetry Prize and appeared in Nimrod, Southern Poetry Review, The Southeast Review, Verse Daily, Ruminate, The Balti-more Review, Whiskey Island, Spoon River Poetry Review, Deliberately Thirsty (UK) and many others in the U. S. and U.K.