Looking Back: Thanksgiving dinner spent with Shari and Bunny

Preface: This is from my childhood memoir that spans the period from 1950 to 1964 when my parents, Bill and Anne Haug, owned a bar on Bigfork’s Electric Avenue.

I ran into the bar hollering, “Mom!  Mom!  Can I go to Shari’s for Thanksgiving dinner?”  

Mom was sitting at her desk in the dark back room, her desk lamp lighting her chin. A cigarette in the ashtray had burned down to the filter, giving off an awful smell. “What’s that, Sugar?”she asked, stubbing out the butt without removing her eyes from the things on her desk.   

I pulled on her sleeve. 

“Mamma!”  I said.  She looked at me.  “Mamma, Bunny said I can join them for Thanksgiving dinner, if it’s OK with you.  I wanna go, Mamma, please?”

“Well, if it’s OK with Bunny, then I suppose you can go.  Your Father and I will be busy at the bar, anyway.”

“Oh boy!”  I exclaimed, running back towards the front door. “Hold up, there, Honey.  What’s the big hurry?” Daddy called from behind the bar.

I spun around, a big grin on my face.  “Mamma said I could go to Shari’s for Thanksgiving.  Bunny’s making a big turkey for dinner.  I gotta go tell Shari, Daddy.”  I started towards the door again.

“Wait a minute!” Daddy said, bending over to pull something from the chilled cabinet below the back bar. “Take this dozen eggs to Bunny.”  One of the local farmers brought his eggs into the bar for Daddy to sell, and sometimes he brought homemade sausages or roasting chickens, too.  “Take it easy, Honey,” Daddy called,  “Don’t break those eggs.”

“I’ll be careful, Daddy.”  I walked out the door and then ran next door, blowing through the broken gate in the fence.  Shari was sitting on the porch steps, playing with her paper dolls.

“What’d she say?” Shari asked.

“She said ‘OK.’  And Dad sent these eggs for your Mom.”

She stood up and we walked into the house.  Her little brother Stevie was playing with a toy tractor on the rug in front of the sofa.  “My tractor,” he said, but we weren’t interested.  

“Here, Bunny, some eggs from my Dad.  Mom said I could come to Thanksgiving.”

Bunny was a short, slightly plump young woman, and was the best cook in the whole world.  She cooked at the Lake Cafe for Al and Elsie.  “Sit down at the table with these, girls,” she said, handing us each a cookie and a glass of milk.  “You can play until Gene comes home.”  

Shari’s dad, Gene, worked at the aluminum plant in Columbia Falls, and was always tired and grumpy when he got home.  He liked to swear bad words, and Bunny would say, “Hush, Gene, you don’t want the kids to hear you.”  But I’d heard all those bad words before, in the bar, so I wasn’t shocked.

There was a Life magazine on the kitchen table.  Shari started to page through it, looking at the pictures.  I looked over her shoulder.  There was a picture of a housewife carrying a hot casserole dish to a table full of kids, with a dad sitting at one end, curls of steam rising from the casserole.  And then another, of the Campbell Kids on either side of a steaming hot bowl of soup.  Shari and I looked at each other and both started to sing, “Soup and sandwich, soup and sandwich, have your favorite Campbell’s soup and sandwich …”

“I want a cookie,” Stevie said, toddling into the kitchen.  Shari whispered to me, “C’mon, lets go play with my paper dolls.”

 “OK, Sugar, time to get ready for your dinner.  What do you want to wear?”  I opened my closet door and looked at my things hanging on the pink wooden hangers.  There was my brand new pleated plaid skirt, and a white sweater to go with it. Mom had made both of them, but they were for Christmas. It was too cold for my pink pedal pushers. I reached up and pulled down a dress of green gingham, with a gathered skirt and a white Peter Pan collar.  “Can I wear this, Mamma?”

“OK,” she said, “and your black patent leather shoes.”

“Oh boy, Mamma!” I chirped.  I loved my black patent leather Mary Jane’s.

Soon I was bundled up in my new wool coat with the fur trim on the collar, with matching muff, and snow boots over my shoes, walking uptown with Mom, hand in hand to Shari’s door.  

To be continued