Thanksgiving and First failed Experiments in Aviation

Today was Thanskgiving; they translate it as El Dia de Gracias but they don’t celebrate it and I’m pretty sure Cortez never shared a meal of brotherhood and understanding with the Aztecs. Then again, neither did the Pilgrims exactly – exchanging influenza for syphilis over cornbread is not what I call a satisfying postre. Anyway, it is my favorite holiday of the year – a non-religious, family-oriented celebration of the fall. Personally, I think it should happen in the beginning of October and outdoors but as I have not been requested for hire as an independent consultant for Hallmark yet, it remains traditionally on a Thursday and in late November. As there it stays, Thanksgiving has become an important marker for what has now become more than a month of Christmas. Although Christmas started on the 25th, a variety of interest groups have been proselytizing and baptizing the previous days from “the 12 days of” to the “2 weeks before” until “the month of…” They seem to be blocked in their concept for the Christmas year by Thanksgiving though and it looks like it will end there unless Easter creeps forward. Anyway, I was never very good with dates and have always depended on my family to remind me when Thanksgiving will be every year. When this year, someone told me it was going to be on a Thursday again, I asked another American doctor, Linea, what we will be doing to celebrate. I remember 12 years ago and in Belarus being invited by the U.S. Embassy to have an official state sponsored turkey dinner, so naturally I imagined being called in by the town council of Altamirano, Chiapas for a special celebration. Instead, Linea said she had planned on making a pie and had indeed already bought all the Plantains she needed. That’s when the poor idea of making our family’s apple pie entered my head. So after a myomectomy and the delivery of an ovarian cyst the size of a small watermelon, I walked down the central street to find apples.

In the one market that had apples, the owner tried to sell me a type called red delicious but I would sooner make an apple pie with fig roots than with red delicious and I think my father would agree. They are soft and watery and sweet apples, really. They are the simple man’s apple. People who enjoy red delicious tend to also own golden labs, enjoy watching golf and drink Budweiser beer. They also eat Chinese food with a fork in case you are still confused. The other option, however, was another red apple. Smaller and bruised, they looked like they had already been thanked for giving by a angry gang of worms, perhaps pawed over by the wild dogs and then used to fill a flat tire on the way to the market. It was a very political decision but I decided to go with the battle-wounded that resembled a cachectic form of what stood out in my childhood memory of a perfect apple for a pie.

Next I had to find orange juice for the crust. I walked to the largest market in town only to find that although I could easily buy peach or guayaba juice in cans, they had no orange juice. Of course I could have squeezed my own but I did not want to spend my entire afternoon making juice as well – which is bound to be nearly as sour as lemons anyway. What they did have was Ju-Mex – a Sunny D-lite/Tang like drink with “real orange flavor.” Seeing as I had already accepted the leprous apples, I bought the orange flavor and went to Juan Manuel’s kitchen to “experiment.”

Assembling the crust proved to be the hardest part. Aside from the OJ imposter, I was faced with no measuring cup, no real bowl, and butter instead of the Crisco that the recipe requires. Linea said I should use 2/3 of the amount of Crisco in butter and I was going to use the full ¾ cup so I decided to split the difference. Because it was cold, the butter had to be melted on the stove and then I mashed it with a fork but I could not get it to mash right and was left with whole chunks of butter buried in flour. So I added more butter. Then more Ju-Mex.

During this whole time I was reminded that my mom used to make clay for my brother and I on rainy days from flour and water and salt. With that thought, I was acutely aware that whereas I had wanted to make dough, I may have been assembling clay instead. Well I mixed everything and it still did not work. So since you cannot subtract in the kitchen, I kept adding until I could finally assemble a ball of dough. Then, worried that the next time I saw it may have turned into a solid sphere (I imagined myself having to explain ‘instead of a pie I made a globe of the world to show you all where I live!’) I wrapped it and put it in the refrigerator to let it think about what it had done.

About that time, Lorraine, our American Ob/Gyn came to help me peel and cut and excise the ulcers from said apples. To my surprise, Odile, the Swiss doctor had shown up the day before with a jar of wheat germ. This wheat germ, an inferior distant cousin to our wheat germ, however, was tasteless and so small and powder-like that if you breathe at it the wrong way, you could scatter it into the wind and make someone sneeze in Guatemala. But since I was making the best of it, I decided to use it anyway, and in fact use twice as much. Even if the apple pie tasted like a box of Kleenex, it was at least going to contain all the right ingredients.

Next, I called the dough out of the fridge and rolled it on the table using an empty jar of jam for my rolling pin. The dough had the distinct resemblance to a stretchable eraser, but subject to enough abuse, it was able to get it into a large enough size for the pie pan. I hurried to transplant it and let it stick to the pie pan before it snapped back into a ball of dough and perhaps rolled itself back into the refrigerator to hide.

Pie completed, I placed it in the oven, lit several matches, and set the oven on level “5” for “hotter than 4.”
When finished, it looked pretty, and people enjoyed it after I had carefully explained to the other doctors in my Spanish that Thanksgiving is the time of the year when the Pilgrims and pumpkins got together and ate the Indians. But in reality, it tasted like apples in a cardboard box. No one noticed, though, and no one tried to top their pie with beans and salsa which was a sure compliment to the chef that they enjoyed the flavor --- or at least the change from the beans and salsa they had piled on top of the beans and salsa that was our dinner.

Making things more authentic for the Thanksgiving experience, the electrical company shut off the power for the entire town at 2pm because the municipal had not paid their bill so we sat ate our dinner by candlelight. There we sat, three people from the United States with the modern versions of native Mexicans, passing apple pie pieces and beans and salsa (though not together) – it was so metaphorically perfect, I may have had tears in my eyes – if you could only see them in the dark!


Yesterday, what started as a simple lantern made of paper by a nurse developed into an intensive origami training program in Lorraine’s room until I would not stop before a hot air balloon was generated. We mastered the paper balloon over our lunch break and I quickly decided to expand to a larger piece of newspaper. Then I taped a plastic cup to it with dental floss below the opening and placed it aside, proud of my accomplishment. Frightened by my concept of filling the cup with gasoline, Lorraine kept the balloon well hidden until tonight when, bored and sitting in the candlelight, I decided it was time to take it to the air. The gasoline stores closed, I filled the cup with tissues and headed outside, my aviation glasses and silk scarf in place. Lorraine followed for the momentous occasion as my “co-pilot,” I said – “chaperone,” she said. After several takes, I finally succeeded in burning the entire balloon, plastic cup and then reluctantly, the tissues. Well, that happened to the Hindenberg too but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t great. A car passed us as we watched my dream of escape turn into a small fiery flare in the dark street. Although I will next be heading to the disaster zone of Hurricane Stan, near Tapachula (where the floods are that had been on the news in the U.S.) and she will be heading to her home in Massachusetts, we both have two days left here in Altamirano and we are both ready to leave. “If the car stops,” I said to her, “tell them we got lost in Texas and our car broke down but we were on our way back to New York and could they give us a ride as far as the border.”

This morning I woke up without electricity, without hot water and without cold water. It is 48 degrees inside during the night and this week my new digital camera was stolen. I don’t know what the pilgrims were thinking, but I would not mind going back to the United States for a few days. At this point it is three more weeks until my break. Currently, however, I am looking forward to that warm Tapachula sun about which so many popular American folk songs have been written. Happy Thanksgiving!!