The Slaw Makers

The Slaw Maker
By
E.B. Carr Jr.

 
     Brown leaves blow across the parking lot and crackle underfoot as I walk up the hill. I’m forced to squint into the bright cold sun light as I pull my jacket a little tighter around me.. It’s not yet winter, but very close to it.
    In New York City in Central Park West.  marching bands and colorful floats are massing to march down Broadway enter Times Square, proceed on to Harold Square, and escort Santa Claus to Macy’s Department Store. Across this country of ours gridiron gladiators have done battle for the honor of their schools amid a myriad of cheering and adoring fans. In homes across the land, family’s are sitting down for the traditional turkey dinner. Thanksgiving is here.
     I have walked up this hill and I’m now sitting on the bench overlooking the town of Buffalo. With collar turned up and hat pulled down against a cold wind, I think of all those warm homes with all those smells of Thanksgiving permeating the kitchens of those homes down there in town. Roasting turkeys, minced meat and pumpkin pies, mashed potatoes, candied yams and a host of other goodies that are about to hit the tables. I can picture family members chatting, aunts and uncles catching up on family gossip. Siblings squirming at the “little kids table” with anticipation of the coming feast. An American tradition.
 
      I am surrounded by people up here at the Vet’s Home, both residents and staff, but yet I still feel alone. As I sit here on this bench, my mind drifts off to a farmhouse in the pinelands of old South Jersey. It’s gone now, a victim of developers.  My mind drifts to a Thanksgiving of long ago, to a family not unlike these I can imagine here in Buffalo. To a Thanksgiving of when I helped my father fix the leaks on old man Millers chicken coops.  It was a strange thing to do on Thanksgiving so I guess that’s why I remember it so well. My father was self-employed, and he had to take jobs as they came along. Old man Millers chicken coops needed repair and that’s what paid for our Thanksgiving dinner that year.
    Mom cooked on a wood stove in those days. A cast-iron affair with ‘warmers’ above which she used to let her bread dough rise. It had an oven off to the right of the fire-box into which the turkey was placed on holidays and a chicken on Sundays. We raised our own chickens and roasting one on a Sunday became a family tradition. How many of you remember breaking the wishbone? My brother Bill and I had somehow gotten the task of making the coleslaw for our family feasts. He and I would set up the “meat grinder” as we called it to make the slaw. It was a handed cranked affair with a vice like device on the bottom that you attached to a table. We did this every year; it became a family tradition, Bill and I making coleslaw. 
 
      Back in today’s world the Fairmount Park Mounted Police of Philadelphia, are about to lead floats and String Bands down Ben Franklin Parkway pass the Philadelphia Art Museum to start off the nations oldest Thanksgiving Day Parade. If I try real hard I can imagine I hear the sounds of String Bands way off in the distances.     
    I’m brought back to realty by the drone of an airplane somewhere far off overhead. I think of the circumstances that put these individuals in the air on a Thanksgiving Day. It must be important. I look at my watch, it’s12:30, time to go back down the hill for our Dinner at the Home. I take one last look across the valley of Buffalo, I stand there and wonder if there is anybody down there who can use a guy who knows how to make coleslaw using an old meat grinder?