A Thanksgiving Personal Essay

I TEACH MEMOIR, a job that includes teaching others how to write a personal essay. I’ve written them for NPR’s All Things Considered, among other places. Here is one of those. Read it, and then ask me questions about how to write a personal essay of your own for publication.

I WAS SINGLE, living in Manhattan, and that morning it was a particularly unglamorous life. With a snapped ankle, a cast and crutches, I thought that no holiday cheer was worth cantilevering the flights from my brownstone apartment. And then the phone rang.

My hostess was insistent. Her son would come into Manhattan and fetch me. I couldn’t let him. And I couldn’t say no. Through the decade it took to lose my mother to Alzheimer’s, these were only people who each year invited us to holiday dinners. And now, it would be my first holiday alone.

No, I’d get there, I promised. I’d take a cab.

The only thing in my fridge I thought worth bringing was a six-pack of imported beer. Into a bag, over my shoulder it went and, balanced on my crutches, facing uptown traffic I felt like little more than a grimace in a skirt. Especially as cab after cab sped away without me after finding out I was going to Queens—not a short trip. If I’d had a lonelier hour in New York I don’t remember it.

Finally, slumped into a back seat, I wept over the Triboro bridge. At Shea Stadium we got snarled in the molasses of holiday traffic.

After a while I looked at the photo on the cabby license and realized the driver was probably about my age. We were going nowhere and the silence was awkward. I offered him a beer and we sat in the traffic by Flushing Bay for more than an hour, having our holiday drink, talking. An actor, without family, far away from home, he had volunteered to work the holiday so other cabbies could be off. When we finally got to Queens, my friends swarmed out the door, fearing, I guess for what had happened to me.

“You have to come in,” said my host to the cab driver.

When he got out of the cab I caught sight of the unfortunately placed hole in the backside of his old sweat pants and hobbled close behind him as camouflage.

Inside were the sounds and smells of the day: Football, ice in glasses, the cacophony of a family gathering its wits for the big production number. My hostess noticed the hole in his pants and offered the cab driver the most comfortable chair in the house and then a seat at the table and later, one on the couch to watch the Giants. What I noticed were all the old friends from my community who kept streaming in to say something to the nice cab driver who had brought me home for the holidays. And who had stayed for dinner.

That night on the ride back I sat in the front seat and Manhattan never looked so much like a candleabra-ed banquet laid out from the Bronx to the Battery. The meter was off. In fact, the fare for the trip out was canceled. He helped me out of the cab and up my stairs. Didn’t give him my phone number; he didn’t ask.

Two weeks later, I was still laid up. Around dinnertime my buzzer rang. It was one of New York’s finest cab drivers delivering a hot meal for me. Nothing more, but more to the point, nothing less.

This piece aired on NPR’s All Things Considered. I offer it here as an example of something I have published or aired in hope it will inspire you to submit your work.

 

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