By Mary Kay Atherton
Now that I have been married 36 years and have so many
Thanksgivings under my belt (literally and figuratively), I can look back on my
first and laugh.
Don and I had been married five months and had recently
moved from Los Angeles to the more rural outskirts of the San Francisco Bay
Area. I was working as a buyer for an upscale retail store in San Francisco.
With the biggest retail day of the year the day after
Thanksgiving, we didn't have time to go home to our parents' for the holiday. So
I decided to try something new: cooking. There were several managers and buyers
who would be spending Thanksgiving alone in the city, so we happily adopted them
for the day.
Thanksgiving morning I thawed the turkey. I have since
then become aware of the fact that this process should have started a few days
earlier.
While the turkey was cooking I took a long walk through
the beautiful countryside to find some colorful leaves and vines for the table.
Once I had entwined vines and leaves through the candelabra and down the center
of the table I had a pile left over. It would have been a shame to waste the
brightly colored leaves, so I made them into a little cup of three or four and
placed them in the center of each plate, topped with a pear half and cream
cheese.
As the day progressed, several of our 12 guests began to
feel warm and itchy.
By that night, one guest went directly to the emergency
room of San Francisco General.
The next day, four were too sick and swollen to report to
work on the biggest retail day of the year. The rest of us trooped in with
various degrees of swollen limbs and several of us had at least one eye swollen
shut. We generally did not look like people you would want to buy something
from. The store's nurse sent for the house doctor, and we went through gallons
of salve to assuage our itchy hides.
The next day, the president of the company sent me a memo
"... the next time you choose to entertain, kindly advise my office so we can
implement disaster preparedness."
And that was how I learned what poison oak looked like!
