My Perfect Thanksgiving, then and now.
We'd been married just over a year. We'd moved from the furnished, dinky, dingy Victorian studio with the nosy landlady to a larger unfurnished one bedroom basement apartment, with low ceilings that, in hindsight, should have made Carl claustrophobic. But oh well. It was a step up. When my folks came up for a visit shortly after we got married and looked around that first apartment, my dad said to me "If I knew what Carl was getting you into, I wouldn't have allowed this to happen." Well Dad, you couldn't have stopped it. When Carl's family came to visit that first place, his young niece needed to use the bathroom. There was a curtain, not a door. And it was close enough to the big Wedgwood stove that you could reach around and move a pot off the fire. Their answer to her privacy concern was "Just sing while you pee!" I decided I'd do the next Thanksgiving. Enough of driving to Newport Beach for holidays. We'd have everybod