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adulthood began, I would stick it on that Thanksgiving weekend in 1981. I was
seventeen. While my roommate packed her bag to go home on Wednesday, I
walked to a supermarket with a shopping list. I had borrowed a copy of The Joy
of Cooking from the library when I realized ( 1 ). I found five other students
who lived in other *dormitories who also had no way of getting home and invited
them to dinner.
It never occurred to me to ask someone if I could stay in my room. It was my
room, after all.
But on Wednesday night, when the heating in the dormitory was
turned down to whatever temperature was needed to keep water from freezing in
the pipes, I wondered if maybe I'd been expected to leave along with all the other
girls. Too late now. The office was closed until Monday morning. In those days,
before cell phones and the internet, such problems were solved not by changing
my coat.
the situation but by changing yourself. I put on another sweater and
(3)
I suppose before I went to college I had been very modestly helpful to m
mother on Thanksgiving. When she asked me to peel a vegetable, I peeled it, an
hen went away to watch the Macy's parade on television until she called me ba
o peel something else made no effort until 1981, when the Thanksgiving din
at people were coming to was mine. That was when I started cutting fro
atter into pea-sized *chunks with a frozen knife in my frozen hands to mak
ie crust.
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