Over the 20 years I’ve been writing them, my
Horribly True Tales output has tapered off quite a bit. I’m sure this is mostly down to maturity
allowing for better decision-making skills on my part, and the ability to
purchase a better class of automobile, since most of the earliest stories seem
to revolve around car trouble. Despite
their infrequency, the stories have still developed a small but faithful fan
base with those who’ve found them through Facebook and my Horribly True website.
However, the audience has been extended beyond those avenues, largely due to
the efforts of my sister-in-law, Amber. Amber
has been a fan of my tales since the late `90s, and has been known to share them
with friends and co-workers, whenever there is need to spread a laugh or
lighten a mood. And because Amber’s husband Jim is career Army, she’s been
subject to frequent moves with each new base assignment and has held half a
dozen new jobs over the course of 15 years.
With each one she has spread my tales to new ears—often in the form of
live in-office readings. However, in the nigh on two decades that I’ve
known Amber, she’s never actually appeared in one of the tales as a
participant. That is, until we took a two week family trip to Alaska in
2016.
The state of Alaska holds a special place in
the lives of my wife and her family. In
the mid-`70s, they moved there from North Carolina, after her father found work
as a mechanic helping construct the Alaska oil pipeline. It’s where they spent the 25 years and where my
wife and Amber grew up, living in different locales with varying degrees of
electricity, plumbing, and access to paved roads. It was a real Little
House on the Prairie existence for much of that time. Frankly, their stories of their real life adventures
rival my meandering nonsense any day. I think the reason they like my
stories so much is simply because it affords them the opportunity to think things
like, “Oh, you had some car trouble one time?
Yeah, that’s cute. Ashley once hit
a moose and her Ford Escort station wagon turned into a cloud of metal
confetti, unrecognizable as having once been an automobile. She was almost decapitated. Oh, and another time, we had to barricade
ourselves in our home-made log cabin because a bear was trying to break down
the door and eat us. But you keep
telling your little stories.”
In the mid-90s, my wife left Alaska, traveling
across the lower 48—in a different Ford Escort station wagon—all the way to
Blue Mountain College in Mississippi, where she would finish up her undergraduate
studies. She never intended to be away
from Alaska and her family for more than a couple of years. However, two things got in the way of this:
A) she decided to go on to medical school and there are no such schools to be
found in Alaska; and B) she had the questionable fortune of meeting and
marrying me. The Alaska-return timeline wound up getting delayed by a
couple of decades, most of it spent in our current locale of West
Virginia. And during those years, her family all moved to the lower 48.
The state itself remains strong in the
bloodstream of her family, though. And if you’ve ever been there, you
know perfectly well why, because your blood has probably picked up some of it
too. It’s one of the most gorgeous places on earth. I find it
stress-inducingly beautiful because I myself have experienced near panic attacks
there in an area called Glacier View, which you can see while traveling along
an area of the Glenn Highway. The road runs
along the Mantanuska River valley in which you can indeed view a glacier. Hell, you could drive on down and lick it if
you wanted. The craggy lush mountains,
capped with snow even in the middle of summer, are spectacular. You want nothing more than to stop and stay a
lifetime and absorb the beauty. And the intense
anxiety you feel gripping your soul is because you know you can’t stay, cause
you have to motor on to catch a plane the next day.
Beyond the beauty, one of the things that my
wife’s family truly misses about Alaska are the blueberries. In fact, if
the word blueberry is mentioned in their presence—and I don’t recommend doing
so—you may as well strap in, cause you’ve got a 10 minute lecture in store on the
topic of how much better Alaska blueberries are compared to berries grown
anywhere else. I’ve seen them turn up their noses at homemade
lower-48-blueberry-based treats on the grounds that it’s just a waste of their time.
Oh, sure, they might try a bite or two, but always with accompanying critical commentary. “Well… that’s good and all,” they say in
weighted tones that you can tell really mean, “Well, that’s a good try.”
I thought they were all delusional until I
finally got to try some Alaska blueberries for myself. I found it to be a transformative
experience. In an instant, I went from “Yeah, yeah, yeah, we
know, Alaaaaaska bluuuuueberrrrriiiiiies,” to “Holy shit!
Where have these been all my life?”
Alaska blueberries don’t grow on tall bushes,
as they do in the lower-48. Instead, they are found growing plentifully
in very low bushes, often in mossy tundra areas. And while they’re not
large, this just seems to concentrate their spicy flavor in a way that other
blueberries can only aspire to. They make excellent jams and
jellies. My wife once traded a shipment of 24 jars of her apple butter
for a similarly sized shipment of Alaska blueberry jam from her friend
Laura. As good as the wife’s apple
butter is, we still got the better end of the deal and should probably have
sent a second box of it to make up the difference.
With the powerful draw of blueberries in mind,
in 2014, for my mother-in-law’s birthday, my wife gave her a gift certificate
good for one trip to Alaska to pick blueberries with her daughter. It was
basically an excuse to make a family trip back home, but blueberries would indeed
be picked. Ma finally cashed in the certificate in 2016, and plans began to
form for the trip. Amber and Jim wanted in on this too, so we all
synchronized calendars and came up with August as the best time to go. We
rented a Winnebago in Anchorage—which is one of the best and cheapest ways to
see the state—restaurants and hotels being as expensive as they are there. Even with five of us crammed into it, the
Winnebago only really felt crowded while we were on the road, because at stops we
could always just step outside and extend our living space into the amazing scenery
wherever we were.
We spent two weeks driving wherever we liked
in search of blueberries and/or salmon, whichever hopped in our baskets
first.
Now, there are three species of salmon
regularly found in Alaska: pinks, silvers, and reds. The red salmon, which are the
best—particularly from the copper river—unfortunately spawn earlier in the
season, so we would have none of them.
The pinks, which are the least palatable salmon, were spawning
currently, but we didn’t want them. Our
best hope was to catch a few silver salmon.
They, it turned out, were pretty thin in the streams. It was technically
their spawning time, but all the fishermen we ran into said the silvers had
either already passed through or were yet to arrive.
The blueberries, however, were
plentiful. We found them throughout the trip—in boggy fields on the side
of the highway near Denali, on remote hillsides just outside of Fairbanks, and
out in a huge field near their old home territory of Salcha. You couldn’t
miss them. We would venture out, the
smell of alder in our noses, each of us keeping an eye out for bears, and pick until
our grocery store sacks were near bursting with blueberries, raspberries, crow
berries and more, which we took back to the camper, sorted, and
vacuum-sealed. And we only stopped picking when there was no more room in
the freezer.
During the trip, we stayed mostly in RV
campgrounds where there was access to water and sewage hookups, not to mention
regular showers. We weren’t scared to stay
in a pull off on the side of the road, or the driveway of a friend if need be.
Near the end of the first week of the trip, though, we got a look at some
fancier digs. We stopped near Delta Junction, to visit a a family friend
who works at the Lodge at Black Rapids. The lodge itself is
nestled on low hill overlooking a stretch of panic-inducing gorgeous scenery,
vast fields, rivers, more snow-capped mountains, the Delta River, the Black
Rapids Glacier itself, and the historic 100-year-old Black Rapids Roadhouse.
I was particularly taken with the lodge. I’ve never spent any time in a lodge, I’d
only seen them on TV. But the Lodge at
Black Rapids was what I’d always imagined one would be like. It’s the
kind of place that must have taken half a forest to build the timber structure and
half a mountainside for the slate-shingled exterior. It’s the sort of place where well-heeled
outdoorsy folk fly in to stay, spending their days hunting, fishing, and
rafting before ambling back for nights of sumptuous meals and drink at a giant
rustic table, beneath hand-hewn beams before retiring to a comfy chair around
the stacked stone fireplace for a snifter of bourbon, cigars, and some manly
talk before bed. I wanted to stay and get to know it a while—at least
until I saw how much it would cost to do so. I made a mental note,
though, that one day I wanted to stay in a lodge just like it.
We motored on, traveling south to Valdez, on
the southern coast, for the last few days of our trip. It was lovely there,
too, despite the fog and rain and the thousands upon thousands of super gross
pink salmon piled up on every shoreline.
Most were still technically alive, but they had either already spawned
or had failed to spawn, and were by then just pale, rotting, ghost fish who
didn’t yet know they were dead. Even in great health, pinks are the Spam of
the salmon family, but even bears don’t want to eat ghost pinks. No silvers could be found among their stinky ranks. And after a day or two of waiting for their
foretold arrival, we gave up and just bought frozen silver salmon from a local
fishery, packed them into coolers and headed north on the first leg of our trek
back to Anchorage.
Hours later, we turned west onto the Glenn
Highway at at Glennallen. And as we
drove into the early evening, the glow of the sun reflecting off of the snowy
whiteness of Mount Drum behind us, we started checking phones and atlases for
likely stopping places for the night.
On the map we spied a tremendous body of water
called Lake Louise. Gotta be fish there, we thought.
And while looking for lakeside campgrounds, what should I spy on the map
but three magic words: Lake Louise Lodge. Immediately, I was dazzled by
visions of the Lodge at Black Rapids, of sitting around the stone hearth,
watching the sun set at 11 p.m. through a two story window, a craft beer in
hand and a belly full of fried sea creatures. According to our phones,
the Lake Louise Lodge was only $20 a night for RV parking! My grand lodge
experience was within reach! Everyone else
agreed as well, we should go forth and check it out. The only downside to this plan was that the
lodge was located 20 miles north of the Glenn highway itself.
Now 20 miles might not seem like much of a
problem for those of us used to paved road conditions in the lower 48. Roads in Alaska, much like the blueberries,
are a different kind of creature. Because
temperatures often dip well below zero throughout the Alaskan winter, the
ground expands and contracts as the upper layers of soil repeatedly freeze and
thaw. This creates frost heaves in the earth. And when frost heaves occur beneath paved
roads, those roads become quite lumpy. It takes every day of the warmer
months for the state to maintain the primary highways of Alaska. Side roads, such as Lake Louise Road, don’t
see as much attention.
The frost heaves we encountered were so bad
that we had to keep the Winnebago under 15 mph or it would have been rattled
apart. It took us 20 minutes to go only
five miles, at which point we arrived at a pull off area beside a pristine little
lake, which was across the road from an even larger and more pristine little
lake. (“Little lakes” in Alaska are what most of us just call “lakes,”
while “big lakes,” like Louise, are what most of think of as “seas.”) We
pulled off, had a look around at the stunning scenery, and everyone in the
vehicle declared that we’d found our place for the night.
Everyone, that is, except me.
As picturesque as our surroundings were, I
didn’t want to stay at the pull off. For one thing, there was a cluster
of three up vehicles at the far end of the pull off, including a dark and possibly
abandoned, pull-behind camper. There was no activity around them. But my fiction-writer’s mind began conjuring
up images of a caravan filled with hungry Alaskan vampires who were just
waiting for the sun to finally dip at midnight, at which point they would
emerge to devour us. It was a dumb image, I knew, but I couldn’t shake
the shudder of dread whenever I looked at the dented up old camper. If
not vampires, there were at least a few cannibal serial killers in there.
However, the even more potent image that I
couldn’t shake was my memory of the Lodge at Black Rapids and the Grand Lodge Experience
that was surely to be had at the Lake Louise Lodge. I could practically
taste it and now the plate was being yanked away from me. Everyone else
was content with the stupid gorgeous lakes by the vampire pulloff, but I kept imagining
how much better it would be at a lodge by a huge honking lake bigger than 200
pristine pull off ponds. Sure, we wouldn’t be staying in rooms there, but
we could certainly use the amenities such a place offered. Jim and the
others could go fishing, I could sit on the deck and enjoy the lakeside
atmosphere.
“I kind of want to check out Lake Louise Lodge,”
I said with what I hoped was confidence. “I mean, that’s where we were
already heading, right?” I added. I had them on this point. The lodge was, after all, the entire reason we
had taken Lake Louise Road in the first place.
Tragically, no one fought me on this.
Not even a little bit. Maybe it was because I’d been a mostly
silent-partner passenger for the entire trip so far, always game to do whatever
everyone else wanted to do simply because they all knew the state better than I
did, and knew what would be fun to do or see. I could tell from their
expressions that they didn’t agree with my proposed course for the evening, but
they grudgingly climbed back into the Winnebago. I took the wheel and we motored on north…
*Ba duM BUM… BA Dum bum*
…up and down the lumpy, frost-heave rutted
road…
*Ba duM BUM… BA Dum bum*
…at 15 mph…
*Ba duM BUM… BA Dum bum*
… like driving over a twenty mile stretch of
railroad track crossings…
*Ba duM BUM… BA Dum bum*
And the soundtrack to this forced-march into
idiocy, beyond the road, were the pained groans of the stressed metal of the
Winnebago’s frame, as it was called upon to maneuver the heaves at odd angles
from both ends. Underlying the groans,
however, was a bed of thick, seething silence of the kind that can only be
achieved when four Winnebago passengers are completely not on board with the fifth
one’s plan, yet also don’t feel like they can say anything without pissing off
the easy-to-irritate guy who had rented the Winnebago in the first place.
*Ba duM BUM… BA Dum bum*
*seethe seethe
seethe*
Very quickly into this asinine crawl, the
realization of just what a HORRIBLE mistake I had made washed over me.
Not only was it a horrible mistake, but I was forcing my loved ones to participate
in my horrible mistake. And because of this, it would not matter how good
the Yelp rating was for Lake Louise Lodge or how good the fishing may or may
not be there. This was going to end in
tears. The only way I could envision this
situation turning out in anything approaching my favor was if the Lake Louise
Lodge turned out to be some kind of five star restaurant/resort combo and, in
honor of the great effort we had made to get there, they would just comp us all
room and board for two nights, with free massages, our own fishing Sherpa to
guide us to their super-secret fishing hole—stocked with nothing but silver
salmon and halibut they’d had flown in from the ocean—and, oh, what the hell,
let’s throw in a perfect clear view of Mt. McKinley, a once-in-a-lifetime
display of northern lights in August, and a free house concert by Stevie Ray
Vaughan. (Yeah, that’s right. He
came back from the dead for us in this fantasy, and that’s not even the least
believable part of it.)
Far more likely, I thought, was that we would
spend an hour getting to the Lake Louise Lodge, it would suck grizzly balls,
and everyone’s vacation would be ruined because of me.
Unfortunately,
as doomed as I felt, I could also see no good way to back down from my stupid senseless
quest. By then we were over 45 minutes into the horrible mistake and I
felt we were too invested to turn back. Plus, I knew there was no way I
could get that behemoth of a Winnebago turned around on a two lane road—frost
heaves or no.
*Ba duM BUM… BA Dum bum*
An hour of painful silence and gut churning
road-conditions later, we at last arrived at the Lake Louise Lodge. And
it was… nice enough, I guess. I mean, I wouldn’t tell anyone NOT to go
there, but it was… okayish. It was
certainly no Black Rapids Lodge by any stretch. It looked pretty much like
a big log cabin that was kind of near a lake. The property itself,
though, looked less like a manicured resort destination and more like the cluttered
back yard of somebody who lives way way out in the country, who had maybe been
doing some home renovations for the last couple of months, hadn’t gotten around
to cleaning up all the building supplies, and who isn’t expecting visitors.
It had a kind of in-progress, patched together feel to it—which can actually be
said of most structures in rural Alaska. (In the lodge’s defense, the
really good view of the place is from the lake itself, which you can see on
their website, and it’s lovely. That’s not the view we had.)
We stared at the lodge with a mix of
expressions from empty to underwhelmed to angry, no one saying much of
anything. After more silence, Jim went inside to arrange our stay while
the ladies bolted from the Winnebago and gathered themselves into a lady
huddle. I was left at the wheel to think
about what I’d done. Clearly no one liked the Lake Louise Lodge. I didn’t like it either, but I still didn’t
see a good way out of the situation. I thought, Well, we invested a long and
painful hour getting’ here, so I guess we have to at least give these grizzly
balls a lick.
Jim returned and led us to the RV campsite. There was a reason it was only $20 a night,
because it was located behind a long outbuilding that both blocked all view of
the lake and which housed a diesel generator. Which was running.
And noisily belching diesel fumes from a vent aimed directly into the RV
site. And, as far as we knew, it would be doing so for the rest of the
night.
I backed the Winnebago into the RV site and
Jim and I began trying to get the thing leveled out and the popouts popped. Meanwhile, the ladies continued to converse outside.
I could see resigned and disappointed expressions among them. Then my
wife walked away, by herself, into a stand of short trees. That wasn’t
good.
Seeing no way to avoid it, I went outside to
go check on her. Before I could follow, Ma came over and said something
to me, but I couldn’t understand her over the noise of the generator.
“What?” I shouted.
“I said, `Is this place… as nice… as
you’d hoped?!’” she shouted back.
“It’s… It’s all right. I
guess,” I said. “Maybe we can finally catch some fish?” I
added lamely.
The truth, though, was that I hated the Lake
Louise Lodge. I even hadn’t set foot in the place, but already I knew
with certainty that this was never going to be the grand lodge experience I had
hoped for. There would be no craft beer
or fried sea creatures. We’d be lucky to
get a warm Shasta and a tube of Pringles.
There was no chance of anyone having a good time. Everybody was disappointed and/or furious
with me. No, this night was going to be miserable on all fronts.
And then, over the intestinal roar of the generator,
I somehow heard Amber tell Jim that she felt a headache coming on from the
fumes. And then I distinctly heard her
say, “I don’t think I can stay here.”
And with those words—those magic words—I suddenly saw the exit from my horrible
mistake. After all, if Amber’s health was being affected by the fumes, we
clearly could not stay there even a moment longer. Before I could say
anything, though, Ma leaned close to me and shouted, “You need to go talk
to Ashley!” She pointed into the stand of young pines where I could
just make out my wife. She had her back to me as I approached, but I
could see her wiping at her eyes. They were red and streaked with smeared
mascara when she turned to look at me.
“We were at such a beautiful place at that
pull off,” she said. “This is terrible.”
“Yeah. It is,” I said.
“We should go.”
Her eyes brightened at this. It was like
she was expecting protest and resistance from me—I cannot begin to fathom
why—but, instead, she found a willing accomplice in a new plan to abandon the old plan.
We couldn’t get the Winnebago packed up fast
enough. The popouts were yanked back in and Jim was barely aboard, with a
refunded $20 in his pocket, when we pulled out with the wife at the
wheel. Nice as it might be under different circumstances, we fled the
Lake Louise Lodge as fast as we could. Which, turns out, wasn’t very fast
at all.
*Ba duM BUM… BA Dum bum*
*Ba duM BUM… BA Dum bum*
During our 40 minute trek back to the pristine
pulloff, I sat in the passenger seat and just felt awful about it all. My
stupid, selfish, romantic dream of lodge-life almost resulted in a night of
misery for my family. I couldn’t keep the tears back. The wife
reached over and took my hand.
“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s okay.”
Later, back at the pristine pulloff, we
feasted upon the single pink salmon we’d caught a few days before. It was super gross, but we washed it down
with some of Ma’s fresh Alaska blueberry cobbler. And the vampires who
emerged from the abandoned camper to attack us at midnight weren’t even all
that hard to kill.
EPILOGUE
Days later, back home in West Virginia, I
realized that this was the first time Amber got to play a pivotal role in one
of my Horribly True Tales herself. For all her work promoting them, I
guess in some twisted way this story is my gift to her. It seems a poor
repayment for all her work somehow—and especially in light of a
horribly-true-related gift she gave to me earlier in our Alaska journey.
It was during the first week of our trip, as
we were camped out in the driveway of a family friend in North Pole, that Amber
told me the tale of one of her horribly true tale readings from a few years
back. It was done at a hospice, where she and others had gathered at the
bed of a dying friend. After days of
sitting vigil and mourning the impending loss, the mood among them had indeed grown
dark. That was when Amber took out her phone, fired up my website, and
began reading horribly true tales. She said everyone laughed until they
cried and that the stories were just the thing to help give them some light in
the face of tragedy.
This is not only the greatest compliment my horribly
true tales have been paid, it is the greatest compliment any of my writing has
been paid. I will forever be grateful that my stories were put to such
use. And to Amber for telling me.
My friend Brenda Barnes Clark is currently running a free ebook promotion for her new middle-grade novel The Runaways: A Billie Rose Tackett Horse Adventure. It’s a historical adventure story set in West Virginia and starring a character of Melungeon descent. Brenda would love it if you’d give it a read and submit a review of it to Amazon.
not one of those people, though, and count it as 10, since there are 10 individual TARDISes present and accounted for. Yep. That’s how I roll. One purchase increased my already sizeable TARDIS collection by 10. That’s some festive holiday efficiency for your ass. 
bookshelf (which is where mine usually live) then they’re great. I give ’em 3.5 TARDi.
A few long time friends and/or followers of this page might have noticed a couple of changes to this site over the years. I’m not just talking about the semi-once-a-decade sprucing up I do on the visuals (it is a nigh on 25 year old site, after all), or the shifting sands of content; no, I’m talking about the name of the site itself. Oh, it’s always been called Mister Herman’s Home Page–or, at least, phonetically it has–but the actual URL address has danced about when it comes to spelling. 
When I worked as a morning drive radio DJ, back in the ’90s, frequently we would get calls from people who wished to complain about something they heard on the radio which had offended them. Trouble was, with very few exceptions, the thing they heard that had offended them had been said by an on-air personality on a completely different radio station than the one I was employed by. Yep, whenever John Boy and Billy said something saucier than most decent folks cared to hear, the O-ffended of Northeast Mississippi had no other recourse than to open the phone book, pick a radio station at random, and then call me or my morning show partner to lecture us about something we’d not even said. We called these the “Ayyyym offended” calls, since they always began with that phrase.
Back in April, I posted here about my then-recent Amazon purchase of a memory foam seat-cushion sold by a company called WAOAW. Said butt-pillow, which had the unwieldly product name of “WAOAW Seat Cushion for Office Chair, Chair Cushion of Memory Foam for Car Seat Cushion,” arrived with an offer of a $10 Amazon gift card should I happen to give it a 5-star review on both their site and on Amazon. While shilling for the man rubs my journalistic integrity the wrong way, I did actually like the cushion. I was also enchanted by the idea of leaving a tongue-in-cheek review that worked the idea of the payola scheme into the narrative of the review, while also using both the word “coccyx” and the full title of the pillow in the review an unnecessary number of times. That way I could leave an honest review while still stabbing an unscrupulous business in the back. I wrote it up and posted it to WAOAW’s site. Unfortunately, before I could post the review to Amazon itself, the Amazon listing for the cushion mysteriously vanished. I assumed it was because Amazon got wise to WAOAW’s scheme, but who knew? I posted it to Facebook instead.
My dad saw the 20th Century Fox film Alien during its original theatrical release. He found it so fascinating and unsettling that he decided to tell me the entire movie in an expanded beat by beat synopsis, during a long car trip. When he finished, I said, “Tell it again, Daddy,” because I too was fascinated and unsettled by it, but wanted to “see” it again, if only in my head. So he told it all again. 
In the `80s, movie novelizations were ubiquitous. If you released a movie, it got a novelization. I’d read several, having been trained to reading adaptations by Target Books Doctor Who novelizations. Alan Dean Foster was a particularly prolific writer of novelizations (as well as his own original sci-fi novels). If it was sci-fi and wasn’t adapted by Peter David, chances were pretty good it was by Alan Dean Foster. I not only bought his Aliens book, but purchased Alien as well to read first, just to refresh myself on the story I’d only been told before. I found the Alien novelization every bit as fascinating as my dad’s telling, but it was also a bit different because it contained scenes that did not appear in dad’s because they weren’t included in the theatrical release. (They were filmed and appear in the directors cut release of Alien, but aren’t necessary unless you’re just curious to see them.) After reading Alien, I felt safe enough to rent Alien on VHS. And because I knew where the scares were coming, I was able to just sit back and enjoy the story from almost a clinical standpoint. It quickly taught me how to hack the horror movie viewing experience–how to see the movie’s creators pulling the strings, through music swells or sudden silences, to bring about the scares and effectively tell the story. I then devoured the novelization of Aliens, and found it as good as the first movie if not even better. And when Aliens was at last available for home video rental, I snatched it up and loved it. No sleepless nights necessary.
Twenty years ago today, some kids got hitched.
About the time I’d set my phone down and given up on capturing the moment, she finally noticed it. Only I didn’t get to see her see it. I only looked up when Ma was smacking the back of the sofa near my head to get me to pay attention. I turned to see Ashley standing directly in front of the picture staring into it with a look of awe on her face. She stood there in silence for over a minute, beaming.
Sadie Mac Dog took her final nap this morning. She was grumpy, too clever for her own good, prone to roll in deer poop at every opportunity, and was the bane of UPS drivers county-wide, but she was still one of the finest dogs I’ve had the pleasure to know. I’m heart broken, but am glad she is no longer in pain. 
This year, 2019, marks the 20th Thanksgiving I’ve spent with my wife in the over 21 years we’ve been a couple. In fact, the one Thanksgiving we didn’t share was when we were dating long-distance in 1998 and she sent me Thanksgiving in the mail—including a box of stuffing, a can of green beans, a can of gravy, a can of cranberry sauce, a can of chicken (to sub for turkey) and a can of tuna for the cat.