Drop in Anytime, We’ll Make Sandwiches

After Thanksgiving at my grandmother’s house in Hastings in the 1950’s, we rode in the dark for three hours on two-lane roads to get back to Detroit.

Sometimes, because he was tired and needed a cup of coffee or because he hadn’t had enough of the joking and conversation that came with Thanksgiving, my dad would suddenly announce that we were going to drop in on J, his brother.

Yes, his brother’s name was J. Not Jay. And it wasn’t short for anything. My dad’s brother’s name was a letter. J.

J and his wife Charlotte were usually in a new place, doing a makeover of an old house, somewhere around Lansing. The place I remember best was an old one room schoolhouse that they’d acquired and were turning into a home. I remember the rooms being framed out with 2 x 4’s so the whole inside of the place looked like a picket fence. My aunt and uncle propped plywood against the 2 x 4’s for the bathroom for privacy, but even so we held it lest something we did in there got heard by the others gathered around a worktable hurriedly spread with a sheet for us to sit down together.

My aunt put on a pot of coffee. That was first.

Then she would make sandwiches. It didn’t matter if it was Thanksgiving that day, the sandwiches would be baloney sandwiches with mayonnaise on white bread. She’d make them and cut them straight across – not diagonally which I thought was a much classier way to slice. When she had a pile of sandwiches made, she’d bring the plate to the table.

My Uncle J would talk about the progress on his latest ‘house.’ My dad would drink coffee and listen hard. Then my mom would say, “Roy, I think we need to get these kids home,” and my dad would pull on his jacket and we would leave. Everyone but my dad would fall asleep in the car.

There was never a plan to visit J. My dad never called in advance. He decided at that moment to turn his car in J’s direction. Then he knocked on the door and whoever answered it – J or his wife, Charlotte – acted like they knew all along that five people would be stopping by for a snack at 9:00 o’clock at night.

That’s how it was then, Thanksgiving when I was a kid.

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Photo by Gio Bartlett on Unsplash