Thanksgiving with Anna

When I was a kid, Thanksgiving was always at Grandma and Grandpa's house. Grandma bought the twenty-plus pound turkey and on Thanksgiving morning, stuffed the bird full of home-made dressing and started it roasting at about six in the morning. When we got there, the smell of roasting turkey filled the entire house and made your mouth water.

Grandma and Grandpa had five kids, so there were a lot of people there. Grandma's big dining table sat twelve, so that's where the adults ate. We kids ate at the kitchen table once we were old enough we didn't need a high chair.

The kids got their plates filled first, either by their mothers or if they were old enough, by doing it themselves, but we couldn't start eating until all the adults were seated and Grandpa said grace. After that, we'd head back to the kitchen for turkey, regular and oyster dressing, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, and some of the other stuff all the other women fixed.

There was no shortage of food since about everything came from the gardens Grandma, Mom, and all the other women planted and cared for over the summer. Aunt Elizabeth always brought green beans cooked with bacon from the hogs Uncle James slaughtered every fall, and Aunt Mary usually brought sweet corn she'd canned. Aunt Sue was the salad lady, and always brought two. One was always a Waldorf salad made with fresh apples from the tree in their back yard. The other was usually a Jello salad of some sort, sometimes pear from their pear tree and sometimes from the berries she'd frozen.

Aunt Jean's specialty was the rolls she'd made that morning. They were lightly browned on top and just melted in your mouth when you took a bite. She said she'd gotten the recipe from her mother but she'd never tell anybody what it was.

Mom always took creamed peas, and she never brought any back home with her because they were so good. The peas came from her garden and the cream sauce was made with milk from Bess, our Jersey cow.

All the women also brought dessert too. There'd be cake and pie and peanut butter cookies, but my favorite was always Grandma's pumpkin pie. She never used store-bought pumpkin. She had Grandpa plant pumpkin seeds in between his corn rows, and when they were ripe, Grandma would go out and pick all the pumpkins and put them in her root cellar so they'd keep.

A couple days before Thanksgiving, she'd bake several pumpkins until they were mush and then mix up her pie filling with the pumpkin, eggs, cream, and spices. She'd put that mix into a pie crust she made with flour and lard and bake three pies the night before Thanksgiving. Lard is supposed to be bad for you now, but Grandma's piecrust just flaked away when you bit into it. Just before everybody sat down to eat, Grandma would make whipped cream from the cream Mom brought so everybody could have a big dollop on their pumpkin pie.

It was fun being with all my cousins, but once I turned thirteen, it was more fun being with the men after the meal. The men would all go into Grandma's living room and talk while the women cleaned up and washed the dishes.

My whole family were farmers, so most of the talk was about what their crop yields were or how many piglets that one sow - the sow that Uncle James almost sent to slaughter because she looked too small to breed - how many piglets she had and there wasn't a runt in the bunch. Sometimes the talk would be about politics, but usually talking politics led to what the politicians were doing to grain prices, and the conversation would gradually get back to how far apart was the best for corn rows or something like that.

I learned that I could sort of steer the conversation if I wanted to by asking Grandpa a question. The men would be talking about picking corn and I'd say, "Grandpa, how did you pick corn before you got a corn picker?" He'd smile and start talking about horses and walking the field picking by hand. My three uncles would join in too.

"Yep, I drove those horses when I was only six."

"James, all you did was sit on the wagon. Dad trained those horses to pull that wagon through the field without being driven."

"Remember having to brush them after we got done before we could eat? Glad I don't have to do that anymore. I just shut off the tractor and head to the house."

Usually after half an hour or so, half the men would be napping and I'd be feeling drowsy. Rich food will do that to you, especially if you have to try everything so none of the woman will think you don't like what they fixed.

I didn't take over Dad's farm after I graduated from high school. Farming was OK, but I didn't get all enthused about plowing and planting like David, my younger brother, did. From the time David was old enough to hold on, he rode the tractor with Dad every chance he got, and by the time he was ten, he could drive it. I was happier reading and building model airplanes.

Dad knew farming wasn't what I wanted to do, so the summer before I was a freshman in high school, he sat me down and we had a talk. He said if I didn't want to farm, I should go to college and make something out of myself. He said if I liked building models, maybe I'd be good at designing the real thing and I should think about becoming an engineer.

I didn't know if that was what I wanted to do, but I took all the math and science classes my high school offered and my senior year, I sent my application to the University of Illinois. Dad seemed really happy when I got accepted, but he was also a little worried and so was I. It cost a lot to go to college, even back then. He said he and Mom would help as much as they could, but I'd have to work my way through school.

What with working a full time job and studying my ass off, I made it after five years. All the work to get my degree in Mechanical Engineering paid off with a good job that I'd start two weeks after graduation. Dad was about to burst with pride at what I'd accomplished, but wasn't happy that job was four hundred miles from home.

My new job was great. I was getting paid for doing work I'd dreamed about doing since my first design class in college, and I was getting paid well. I got a furnished apartment that was a lot nicer than the dump I'd lived in while going through college and bought a better car, still used, but a lot newer and nicer.

I even partied a little with the single guys in the office, but not for long. I'd been taught to save my money, not fritter it away, and sitting in a bar drinking beer with a bunch of guys seemed like frittering to me. I was looking for a girlfriend too, but bars didn't seem to be the place to look. There were a lot of girls there, but after buying drinks for a couple only to have them thank me and then go dance with somebody else, I decided those girls were only looking for a good time rather than a boyfriend.

I looked around at the women at work as well, but at the time, most engineers were male and the only women around were secretaries or clerks and most of them were already married.

Wendy wasn't married and she was cute and smiled all the time. She also had a nice figure. Wendy was the HR Manager's secretary though, so she was pretty careful about getting involved with anybody. As she explained to me, if she went out with me, the other people might think I had an inside track to HR that would get me bigger raises. I didn't think it would do that, but I gave up after asking her out twice.

Hannah would have gone out with me, I'm sure, but Hannah didn't interest me. She was the secretary to the Engineering Manager, and seemed to be a little stuck up because of her position. I didn't have to have a woman who was beautiful like Hannah, but I did want a woman who was nice to be around.

I did date a few of the other women, but we didn't click. I think mostly it was me. I just wasn't into fancy dinners and club hopping like they were. After six months, I'd pretty much given up on the women at work and started looking elsewhere. My problem was that "elsewhere" was places like the grocery store and my apartment building, and it was pretty hard for me to just walk up to a woman I'd never seen before and ask them out. That all changed one day when I'd come home after work and was walking to the door of my apartment building.

The woman was trying to carry two suitcases and a couple of boxes at the same time, and she was having trouble. The suitcases weren't that big and neither were the boxes, but the woman wasn't very big and she couldn't keep the boxes under her arms while she lugged a suitcase in each hand. I got to her right after she dropped a box for the second time.

"Would you like some help?"

She looked up at me and smiled.

"That would be great. I should have made two trips, I guess, but I didn't think it would be this hard."

I said I'd carry the suitcases, and she smiled as she sat them down.

"I didn't think I had so much in these, but they're heavy."

Well, they weren't really heavy, but like I said, she wasn't a very big woman either.

She didn't say much when we took the elevator to the fourth floor, and she didn't say anything except, "This is home", when she stopped to unlock the door. I followed her inside with her suitcases and then asked where she wanted them. She said, "Just anywhere. I'll unpack them later", so I sat them down next to the couch and asked if she had more to bring up.

It was about half-dark at that time of day in October, so I hadn't really seen her well outside. In the lights of the room, I could.

She looked a little older than me, not by much, maybe a couple of years. I'm not sure what it was that made her look that way. Maybe it was that she didn't have the "cute" features of a twenty-something girl, you know, the little perky nose and skin without any lines. Her face was more mature looking somehow.

She smiled again and said she had six more boxes in her car but she thought she could manage. I shook my head.

"No, I'll help if that's OK. It'll take you a lot of trips and I don't have anything better to do."

As it was, it still took us two trips. Evidently she favored minimizing the number of boxes over minimizing the weight of each, because the first one I picked up out of her blue minivan must have weighed sixty pounds. I grunted a little when I picked it up and she chuckled.

"I had a hard time getting that one in my van, but I thought it was just me."

"What's in here? It feels like a block of concrete."

"It's my books from nursing school. They come in handy sometimes so I never sold them. Can you manage, or should I unload some of them?"

I didn't want her to think I was some sort of weakling, and once I had the box by the bottom, it was more bulky than heavy so I said I'd be OK if she'd open the doors for us. By the time we got back up to her apartment though, I was struggling. She asked me to set the box on the table and we went back down for the last boxes.

I carried two this time, but they weren't quite as heavy. They were her shoes, she said, so that was probably the reason, though I didn't know why a woman needed two boxes of shoes. I had the shoes I wore to work - plain black oxfords - one pair of running shoes for the weekends, and one pair of work boots I had for when I went to construction sites.

When I sat those two boxes on the floor, she smiled again. I was starting to like that smile because it sort of lit up her whole face.

"I can't thank you enough. I don't know how I'd have gotten my books up here without stopping to rest a few times, and I'd still have been carrying boxes if you hadn't come along."

I grinned.

"Well, I live here too, and when I saw you having trouble, I thought it only right that I should offer to help you. I'm Tom Pence, by the way. I live one floor down."

There was that smile again.

"Pleased to meet you Tom. I'm Anna Wilson. Well, I should probably start putting stuff away. I have to be at the hospital in two hours."

I asked which hospital and she said Memorial. That was an interesting coincidence. My engineering firm had gotten a contract from Memorial to design the new wing Memorial was building and I was part of the design team working the structural steel for that project.

"That's interesting. I'm working on a project for Memorial's new wing. Maybe I'll see you there sometime."

She shook her head.

"Probably not. I work the ER from seven at night until seven in the morning Friday, Saturday and Sunday unless I work overtime on one of those days."

"You work a twelve hour shift?"

She nodded.

"Yes, most nurses do. We only work three days a week though, so the time off makes up for the long work days a little."

"You must not have much of a social life if you're working all weekend."

Anna smiled.

"Right now, a social life is the last thing I need."

"Oh, why is that, if that's not too personal a question?"

"I got divorced six months ago, and I need some time to think about where I'm going next."

I said I was sorry, but she shook her head.

"No, don't be sorry for me. It was a good thing. We got married while I was still in nursing school, and since he was in medical school, we had a lot in common. After I graduated and got a job, he was in residency so we hardly ever saw each other. When we did, we found out we didn't really have much in common anymore.

"He was in residency as a surgeon, and all he could talk about was how big this tumor was or how many stitches he had to make. I wanted to start doing things other than nursing, but he was working all the time. After six months of fighting over that, we decided it would be better for us both if we split. We're still friends."

When I left Anna's apartment I was wondering if she'd ever find a man who could put up with her work schedule. I'd done about the same thing when I went through college -- worked at night, went to classes during the day, and studied in between. What that left me was about six hours a day to eat and sleep. Weekends were my recovery time so I slept about twelve hours and studied the rest of the time.

It wouldn't be quite so bad for her because she only worked three days a week, but after three, twelve-hour shifts, Anna had to be beat so she'd probably sleep in on Monday. That would leave really three days to be with somebody instead of four, and if the guy worked during the day, they'd have only four nights a week together. You can do a few things at night during the week, but the guy would want to do things on the weekend when he was off. Anna would be working or sleeping. I didn't rate her chances very high even though she was a nice-looking woman.

The hospital addition was six stories like the rest of the hospital, and that meant there was a lot of steel to be erected. Once the contractor had erected the first floor steel and had everything bolted and welded together, all the connections had to be checked to make sure everything went according to the design.

If something was out of plumb or level, the building probably wouldn't come down, but the error would be magnified as the floors it supported went up. For the same reason, the steel for the other stories had to be checked as well once they were done. Since I was the guy who designed the steel columns, beams, and bracing, I was the engineer who had to do the checking.

It was late Friday afternoon two weeks later that my boss said the contractor had finished the first floor steel and since he was behind by a day, wanted to start on the second floor on Saturday. I'd have to go out Saturday morning and do my checks. I didn't like the idea of ruining my Saturday that way, but it was part of the job I'd signed on to do. Saturday morning about eight, I drove onto the site and told the construction supervisor I was there to check the steel.

I was about eleven when I finished and gave them the go-ahead to start setting the second story. Everything had been OK except for a couple of bolts they'd forgotten to tighten and they fixed that while I watched.

To get off the site, I had to drive through the hospital parking lot, and as I was doing so, I saw a woman in blue scrubs get into a blue minivan that looked a lot like Anna's. I didn't think too much about that since Anna should have been gone by the time I got to the site. When I drove into the apartment parking lot, the same woman was getting out of the blue minivan and I saw it was indeed Anna. I caught up with her while she was waiting for the elevator in the lobby.

"Hi Anna. I thought you only worked until seven."

She smiled, but it was a really tired-looking smile.

"Yeah, it's supposed to be that way, but one of the day nurses called in sick so I volunteered to work over four hours. Wish I hadn't. We had four people from a car wreck come in at nine and it took an hour and a half to get them stable enough the doctors could start fixing broken bones and stitching up cuts. I'm bushed."

The elevator door opened then, so we walked in. I pushed the button for the third floor and then pushed the one for the fourth floor. When I turned around, Anna had leaned against the side of the elevator and closed her eyes, and I had to chuckle.

"Maybe I should ride up to four so you don't spend all day sleeping in the elevator."

Anna opened her eyes and grinned.

"So you could put me in bed? Wouldn't do you any good. I'm too pooped to party."

That was something I hadn't expected, but I liked it that Anna seemed to have a sense of humor.

"Nah, I'd just make sure you got to your door. Wouldn't look good if you fell asleep in the hall."

She grinned and pushed herself upright again.

"I'll make it by myself, but thanks for offering to help."

The door opened on the third floor then so I said good-bye and walked down the hall.

I thought it was interesting that Anna had jokingly accused me of wanting to put her in bed. We'd only met that one time, and most women would have been pretty careful about what they said until they knew me better. That's how it went when I'd been out on dates anyway. The girl would make small talk, but even after the second date, wouldn't be joking like Anna had.

The next time I saw Anna was when I was going to work Monday morning. She was coming into the lobby a little after seven as I was going out, so I stopped and asked how she was doing. Anna smiled.

"I'll be fine once I sleep all day. I worked over on Sunday too. Thank God, Emma came back to work this morning or I'd still be there."

Anna frowned then.

"Emma thanked me for covering for her, and then she told me she really hadn't been sick. She and her boyfriend spent Saturday and Sunday at her house. She said they didn't get out of bed until noon and then she grinned at me and said that was because they weren't sleeping and I should try that because it relieved all of her stress.

"Can you believe that? She let our doctors down and for what -- a couple orgasms? I could never do that. I took the 'Nightengale Pledge' when I graduated from nursing school and promised to always serve doctors faithfully, not just when I wasn't horny."

I was a little surprised at that statement for two reasons. One -- Anna didn't seem like the type of woman who'd say "horny" -- and two, I was a little surprised that she'd tell me something like that. I was also impressed that she was so aggravated at the other nurse for what Anna thought was violating her oath. I hadn't seen that much dedication in any of the women I worked with. Those women just worked the job for the money and not out of any sense of loyalty or duty.

I also didn't know how to reply to that statement, so I said I needed to be getting to work and that I'd see her later. Anna smiled again then.

"Sorry to have unloaded on you like that. It's just that being there to help the doctors help patients is important to me. I'll get over it once I have some sleep. You take care."