FOOD | Julianne Glatz

My family has had a few Thanksgivings that really stand out. Most have involved either bad weather in the form of snowstorms, or traveling. When I was 10, we drove out to San Diego to have Thanksgiving with my grandmother’s brother and his wife. That one was weird – it didn’t seem like Thanksgiving at all with balmy weather and swaying palm trees. What I remember most about that Thanksgiving is eating lunch at a Taco Bell – it would be well over a decade before the chain expanded into Illinois; back then the food was new and exotic (and much better quality than it is now).

Then there was the time my mom and grandparents and I drove to Georgia to have Thanksgiving with my dad, a career National Guardsman stationed there for a training course. Another year a blizzard knocked out power lines the day before Thanksgiving, leaving us with no electricity for almost 24 hours (it came back at 11 a.m. Thanksgiving morning) and 18 people coming for dinner.

But our most memorable Thanksgiving wasn’t primarily about either bad weather or making a journey, although they did play a part. And even though they were significant factors, I wasn’t involved with either of them. In fact, I didn’t even eat Thanksgiving dinner with my family that year. I was in the hospital.

The reason it was our most memorable Thanksgiving was in the hospital, too: Our first child, Anne, was born just after midnight on Wednesday.

Anne wasn’t supposed to be a Thanksgiving baby. My due date had been Oct. 25. The timing seemed perfect. My husband, Peter, was in his freshman year of dental school at the University of Illinois’ medical campus. A late October birth would give him plenty of time before he’d begin studying for finals; by Thanksgiving the baby and I should be able to travel to Springfield.

Humans plan and God laughs. I laugh whenever hearing first-time couples talking about their due date as if it’s set-in-stone and making plans for before and after the birth. All three of my kids were a month late. Nowadays doctors rarely let pregnancies go that far beyond term, but on that Tuesday before, I had an appointment with my obstetrician to “discuss options.”

It was Peter’s last day of classes before the holiday and before finals. He’d gone into the dental school to take his last Gross Anatomy test. (Gross was the appropriate term – pins were stuck into different muscles and body parts of a roomful of cadavers, that the students had to walk around and identify. Yuk!) He said he’d be home by 3 p.m., in plenty of time to come to my 4 p.m. appointment. When he hadn’t come by 3:45, I began getting anxious. Minutes before the appointed time, I called the doctor’s office. “Don’t worry, we’ll wait for you,” the receptionist told me cheerfully. 4:15….4:30… and still no Peter. By now I was frantically pacing the floor. Oh, to have had cell phones back then! I felt a rush of fluid – my water had broken. Where could Peter possible be? Thankfully, he showed up just minutes later. He’d been up most of the night studying for the GA test and fallen asleep on the El. Not only had Peter missed the transfer that would bring him to our Oak Park apartment, but he’d not woken up until the very end of the line, in the farthest reaches of Southside Chicago and had to make his way back.