Thanksgiving: No Nipples at the Dinner Table (New Family Rule)

For our wedding rehearsal dinner in September, Hayden asked what sort of outfit would be appropriate. I said something upscale but not formal. He sent a snapshot of him wearing a sheer long-sleeve blouse that revealed all of his tattoos, thoracic jewelry, and underarm mammalia. While I want to encourage his individuality, and I know how much people tend to enjoy observing someone with the confidence to dress in a way they’d never let themselves, I felt within my rights to extemporaneously fabricate a previously unneeded family rule: no nipples at the dinner table.  

Because it was a special occasion, he gracefully stood down and chose a white sequined tuxedo jacket with a black lizard skin vest and no shirt, thereby complying handsomely with the letter of his father’s fresh and untested stricture.  

For the wedding, he wore a crushed velvet suit in dark emerald with a homemade gold vest, black silk shirt, and bolo-like contraption made of poultry bones. (I had said that a necktie was a necessity at our nuptials, but allowed that he could be “a little creative” with it.)

Tomorrow, at Thanksgiving, I believe the key sauce element of his outfit will be his new stilts, which he picked up in order to film an audition video for a performing arts school back east. 

Throughout my adult life I have privately indulged in the idea of being the dad who waits at home in a v-neck sweater, reading in his wingback chair as squirrels in red-check shearling caps hop over the tidy pile of leaves, waiting for his collegiate child to come home up the walk. The house is warm, and there is a cozy spare room with a bed good enough that an adult would actually consider it for sleeping on full-time. A roasted brown thing is in or on the stove. 

This year, when he arrives for Thanksgiving from his gig managing the farm, I’ll be sitting watching porchetta videos in an old upholstered chair a cat peed in a long time ago (you can only smell it if it’s been hot out and you sit down too fast), and probably wearing something I can get porchetta spatter on. He’ll park his ‘96 Buick Roadmaster hearse (“David”) outside, come carrying his stilts up the front steps I just rebuilt, and ask if I can walk with him while he practices.

We did this last time he was over, too: his hair (dreadlock-type stuff, now) nearly brushing the nine-foot ceiling of the living room, he unself-consciously held my hand as I guided us in a loop around the dinner table and couches. We hadn’t shared a moment like that in a while — part of me just assumed they were over — but it instantly joined a suite of my most revered memories: holding his hand as he learned to walk alongside my knee, holding his seat for those eternal afternoons of learning the bike, even holding him close as he wept over grade-school friendships gone cruelly sour. 

Some may claim that there is not always a deeper metaphor in holding a father’s hand for safety and reassurance, but there is. I will always welcome it, even when he is the president of Cirque du Soleil and juggles out the first pitch for the Yankees.   

Happy Thanksgiving from the Onstad home, and if it’s just another Thursday to you and yours, well, I still wish you a wonderful day of monochromatic overeating.   

—C

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