A Swanson's Thanksgiving

A retrospective journey from "Zombie" to "Clown" to "Storyteller."

THANKSGIVING 1985
“The answer is: ‘A kick returner who touches, but fails to catch, the football has committed one of these hand warmers.’”

As the familiar voice of Alex Trebek issued from my 18-inch Mitsubishi, I muted the TV and pondered the Jeopardy! brain teaser.

Adjusting my gaze, slowly taking in the darkness of my Burbank studio apartment as a bluish glow from the television danced against the walls, I began to chew on a piece of gravy-slathered turkey cut from a Swanson’s frozen dinner. The ensemble’s red cranberry sauce, which included one actual, solitary cranberry, sat in one corner of the aluminum tray, silently awaiting consumption.

Hmm… I pondered, gazing up at the ceiling trying to mine the mental stalagmites that might lead to the correct Jeopardy! answer. Fails to catch a football. Hand warmers. Where’s the connection?

No synaptic connections were forthcoming.
Human connections were lacking as well.

I was alone on this chilly Thanksgiving Day in 1985, an angry 27-year-old estranged from family. In a way, it felt as though I’d been alone my entire life. Still, it had been my decision to step away.

One month earlier, I’d written a scathing letter to my parents, explaining how for years I’d been treated like a second-class citizen, and outlining several of the many times I’d been … well, “abused” was an apt word. The scars, however, weren’t physical.

As Trebek issued forth another Jeopardy! challenge from my muted TV and I used a fork to flick that cranberry around its tiny home, I thought of a poem, one with a noted twist, that my therapist had mentioned about a year earlier:

Sticks and stones
May break my bones
But words can kill you.

---

“Larry, it sounds like you’re the family’s ‘identified patient,’” my therapist, Rick, had said one overcast morning two months earlier in his office.

Rick had been there when I’d come to the decision to walk away from the family unit. Throughout the previous year, he’d patiently listened as I shared my anger over the way I’d been treated.

“The family’s what?”

“Identified patient,” Rick said. “You’re that one family member, almost always in a dysfunctional unit, who’s used to express the family’s deeper hidden conflicts.”

“What hidden conflicts?” I asked.

“That’s why we’re here,” Rick said. “To unearth them and see where that leads us. Your role – a role you of course didn’t choose, and a role nobody consciously chose for you – is to draw attention away from these more significant conflicts. And I hate to say it … but it works beautifully.”

“So you’re telling me I’m a scapegoat.”

Rick smiled. “That’s another way of putting it.”

We’d gone over how my role in the five-member clan had been manifested years earlier by nicknames thrust at me, relating a typical scenario that had occurred all too often.

“Pass the salad, Zombie.”

We were having a family dinner one spring evening a few years earlier, and my brother was reminding everyone of my tendency to get deeply lost in thought, perhaps dissociating from a tense environment that was, all too often, little more than a war zone.

“Yo. Earth calling Zombie. The salad?”

A zombie is an undead creature, a reanimated corpse lacking free will.

Nobody objected to the dig. Nobody reacted. Vignettes such as these had become all too common and accepted by everyone … myself included.

I’d related to Rick many other incidents, scenes involving longstanding nicknames such as Loser, Louse and Goofy. Taken separately, they barely made a dent in my armor. Collectively, however, it had become a case of “death by a thousand tiny cuts.”

Never one to exaggerate, my soft-spoken therapist nevertheless referred to the way I’d been treated as a form of “soul murder.”

Rick and I had discussed how I’d internalized these toxic labels. The very idea of releasing these names always left me freefalling in a void of my own creation; having Louse or Goofy no longer available to define me as a human being felt, oddly enough, like a form of annihilation. Why? I had no idea.

One day during an October session, I exploded. “I gotta get the hell out!”

“Of what?” Rick inquired.

“Everything! Everybody!”

Pursing his lips slightly, my therapist shifted in his chair and adjusted his glasses … waiting.

“I can’t take it anymore,” I muttered, bending forward and stifling a sob. “I gotta get out of the family.”

“You gotta get out of the family,” Rick reflected back.

Slightly perturbed, I lifted my head and gazed around the office. “Do I hear an echo?”

“What would removing yourself from the family look like?”

The words came to me in an instant: “Freedom. Breathing room. Lightness.”

---

I polished off the microwaved turkey, pondered sampling the off-white gelatinous mass that Swanson’s that somehow called “mashed potatoes” … and eyeballed that one cranberry, sitting alone in its little corner of the tray.

Alex Trebek broke the silence: “One term for talking trash about someone is ‘throwing this,’ like a big elm tree might do.”

“What is shade?” I said, followed by …

“ … I’ll take Self-Imposed Loneliness for $400, Alex.”

---

I’d walked away from the family one week after my latest session with Rick. When my sister first heard of my decision, she reached out to me, wondering what she’d ever done that justified cutting her out. My only answer: absolutely nothing.

During our conversation, she made it clear that she understood exactly where I was coming from, and that she’d always be there for me. So we stayed in touch. I remain forever grateful for that.

My hope was that, in creating some therapeutic distance, my parents and brother would start treating me not as a scapegoat, but with the love and acceptance deserving of any child or sibling. Beneath my anger, I was concerned – no, terrified – that, when the time came to reconnect, weeks or even years into the future, my parents and brother would reject me, that my forced emancipation would backfire like raw gas on a pilot light.

---

The wall-mounted rotary phone rang, breaking up the rapid-fire jousting between Trebek and the three trivia-saturated contestants.

Could be a friend, I thought. Maybe someone was calling to reach out to wish me a Happy Thanksgiving and remind me that, despite all that had transpired, I still had many things to be grateful for.

But nothing came to mind.

I set aside what was left of my 5-star gourmet feast, by then composed of nothing more than Barry, my cranberry soulmate for the evening. I scrambled out of the faded leather recliner to answer the call.

Then it dawned on me: Maybe it’s Mom or Dad. Or my brother.

I sat back down and counted the number of shrill telephone rings … until the ringing ceased.

I never knew who called.

---

“What would you ultimately like to see if you walk away from the family?” Rick had asked about a week before I mailed The Letter to my parents.

The answer came instantly: “I just want Mom and Dad to treat me like they do my brother,” I said. “But I don’t know if doing this’ll make any goddamn difference.”

“There’s really no way of knowing,” Rick said, “unless you go for it. It’s your call; trust your gut. But just know that, whether you walk away or not, I’m not going anywhere.”

---

Alex tossed out another clue into the dark apartment: “Known as The Disco Kings in the ’70s, this British trio kept ‘Stayin Alive’ from 1958 to 2012.”

I immediately thought of the one and only Bee Gees song that resonated with me: “I Started A Joke,” a 1968 tune that had always left me feeling vaguely melancholy. But as the Jeopardy! broadcast cut away to a detergent commercial, snippets of the song’s lyrics coalesced into something far, far more powerful.

I started a joke
Which started the whole world crying …
I started to cry
Which started the whole world laughing …
I finally died
Which started the whole world living …

And I started to cry.

---

THANKSGIVING 2025
Nearly forty years later to the day, I’m sitting at my desk, recalling that first Jeopardy! question, the one posed by Trebek before I muted my TV to take in my dark studio apartment and ponder my then-recent choice to step away from the family.

“A kick returner who touches, but fails to catch, the football has committed one of these hand warmers.”

“Muff,” this 67-year-old sighs aloud, as tears again form in his eyes for the umpteenth time in the past hour.

Muff, as in screw up.
Muff, as in a source of regret.

Maybe divorcing my father, mother and brother for two years had been a mistake. To this day, I’m not sure.

As I sit here at my keyboard, pausing to take in my warm, colorful, well-lit apartment, it occurs to me that no significant change has occurred in my life during my time away from the family … nor in the years since we reunited.

But perhaps that’s not entirely true.

For only today do I realize that a notable shift occurred during Thanksgiving 1985, when I began to adopt a new persona, one that helped me deal with all the toxic labels that I’d somehow fused into a deep-seated birthright I never deserved.

Clown. Joker.

Forty years ago, I began to look at life as an infinite source of humor, much of it self-deprecating. Today, I continue to clutch onto those old, toxic labels, as if my very existence depends on it. Why? That remains a mystery … or a massive blind spot. Still, at least laughing at myself and the world around me has helped me cope with – or perhaps continue to bury – four-plus decades of hopelessness.

I’m beginning to realize that fleshing all this out via an outlet I’ve managed to keep entombed for decades – writing – can help me start to unearth all that I’ve buried. Who knows?

What I do know for certain is this: The only way to find out is to keep writing.

Yet as that old Bee Gee’s song again comes to mind, I have my doubts, my old thought patterns, my all-to-familiar demons …

Oh, if I’d only seen …
that the joke was on me

Recalling these lyrics, I become, for a brief moment, that lonely cranberry, sitting in his little, dark corner of the world.

Still, I feel a slight glimmer of hope. I’ve learned that I can let go of the Old by reaching out, clawing toward, fighting for and, ultimately, embracing any form of the New.

And maybe I can embrace that New by freeing my soul – one day, one idea, one story prompt, one sentence at a time – through my keyboard.

Writer. Storyteller.

I love those nicknames.

It’s what I do. It’s who I am.

Kudos to Alden Cox, Kathy Ayers, Brigitte Kratz, Neha Patel, Dana Allen and Rick Lewis for their encouragement and feedback while this essay was being developed.

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