Month: November 2021

                                            THANKSGIVINGS, HALF-BRO (?) JOE, and MO

                           Begun Nov 23, 2021-Completed hopefully by Nov 25, hopefully, 2021

The most important Thanksgiving for me was in 1938, eight years before I was born. Dad and Mom were married at Mom’s aunt and my great Aunt Em’s(Emma Dunn Cook, sister of my maternal Grandmother Nancy Dunn Beaty-I’ve written a little about Mom and her sister, Edna living at Aunt Em’s in an earlier story entitled My Most Unforgettable Character about my maternal Grandfather, William Badger Beaty) house off Tuckaseegee Rd in Charlotte on Thanksgiving Day, 1938. I don’t know who married them, who attended, whether they celebrated by eating Aunt Em’s whole wheat biscuits (Bill, Harry and I thought they were delicacies, probably just because they were different from Mom’s white flour biscuits), or anything else about their nuptials. I don’t know where they spent their first married night, maybe in or near Asheville. Dad was living in Atlanta and they must have been headed there, but they at least stopped in Asheville because we have a photo of them in their Sunday best, Mom wearing a hat and corsage and Dad a tie, topcoat and hat, outside the Grove Park Inn in the snow. In commenting on the picture in the past, I’ve said that they didn’t stay in the Grove Park because they couldn’t afford to, but I really don’t know if that’s true. Maybe one of them told that but if so, I don’t remember them telling it. Maybe, like how many stories from our past get embellished with time, I, to use a phrase of my sons, “put a little meat in” that story.