Our first date occurred on Thanksgiving Eve of our junior year in high school—which will be 40 years ago tonight at 6:30 pm. That’s the time David picked me up, and when we got in his car, I blurted, “Happy Thanksgiving Eve!” because those were literally the only words in my head at that moment. They were nerdy. But they stuck.
For 40 years we’ve each tried to be the first to say them. Some years I got the drop on him; some years he beat me to the punch. Essentially every time they were said, it was in a chaotic car filled with restless children as we made the four-hour trek over the river and through the woods to the grandparents' homes, or later, in the midst of chaos as our kitchen filled with family who’d gathered to help us prepare for the next day’s feast.
This photo isn’t from Thanksgiving Eve. It was taken last January in the middle of an empty restaurant, in the middle of an empty Strip, in the middle of an empty Las Vegas. We’d escaped our Covid-era “home office” and set up shop for a week in an amazing (and empty) hotel for the week because we felt we needed a change of pace. So, instead of looking out over an empty neighborhood, we looked out over an empty parking lot, and we worked. It was actually an adventure. We parked in front of the Bellagio fountains and watched them dance to the amplified strains of Frank Sinatra like they were only performing for us—because they were. Not a single taxi honked for us to get out of the way. We had the city to ourselves.
And when we went to dinner at Maggiano’s, we walked through a completely deserted mall to get there and they seated us in a nearly empty dining room, so when the photographer came to our table and offered to take our photo, we couldn’t really say no. We had an excellent career waiter all to ourselves. He’d been working there for 30 years and confided in us his worries for the future. We tipped him well.
I love this cheesy mid-meal photo because when David asked me to the dance 40 years ago, it made me feel like the luckiest girl in the world, and to this day, attention from David still makes me feel the same way. The photographer captured the exact feeling of giddiness, and that’s why this photo now has a place on our piano. It reminds me that I’m lucky, even in a chaotic kitchen or an eerily silent city or through these treacherous ups and downs of life, because I’ve had my best friend right there at my side for all of it. It is a privilege to have had that for 40 years, and I hope and pray we'll get another 40 together before either one of us has to face Thanksgiving Eve alone. I've always been the one to mark the milestones--memorialize the moments. It's in my DNA. So, in case I bow out early, one of you should make an effort to call David early in the day and say it, you know, to keep him on his toes.
Hey David Longhurst, just to be clear, this is me saying it first. Happy 40th Thanksgiving Eve!!
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