HANGING OUT WITH FOOD AND FUN!! Nov. 1621

                                       FOOD AND FUN

Nov 1621.
                                    



This lovely painting doesn't show 90 Indians and 53 Pilgrims. But it is so sweet and it points out the outdoor setting because there wasn't a building large enough for all the participants.


             
There was a high table where the leaders of the Pilgrims and Indians sat.

The people at the Thanksgiving (they called Harvest) festival used knives and spoons to eat. They had no forks. We ate with our hands. If there were bones encountered, we spat them on the ground.  There was an abundance of food and it was hot. It was cooked over an open fire.  I stood in the background watching until I saw my new friends sit down and they motioned me over.  

We drank water, fruity juices and cider; there was a scarce amount of alcohol. I drank cider and found it very pleasing.

Yes, there was turkey but no cornbread dressing and gravy.



WE ate a little turkey, but mostly venison, grouse, duck, seafood. Lobster and swans. There was even bass. sweet potatos  but no pumpkin pie. Priscilla said they were too low on sugar and flour to make pies.  But I especially liked the roasted squash and with the sweet fruits, it was a delightful meal. Tray after tray was brought out full of hot food. We had corn porridge and dishes made of cabbage and onion.  No bread or butter. But the enthusiasm for the food could not have been greater.And just watching everyone digging in made me dig in too!!

                             THEN CAME THE FUN

There was a lot of singing. I did not recognize a single song. But obviously singing was important to the Pilgrims because they knew all the words and sang out with gusto!!

 The children occupied themselves playing games.  The  Wampanoag children taught the Pilgrim children how to play the pin game, in which the objective was to toss a ring onto a pin. They also played things like blind man's bluff and tag.  Games like hide-and-seek and leapfrog may were also part of the entertainment. It was wonderful watching the children having so much fun together.

to celebrate the harvest, both the Pilgrims and the Indians danced and sang during the celebration. Women danced the jig and sang hymns.

 Men competed in target shooting...Indians with their bows and arrows and Pilgrims with their muskets.

Men practiced marching in formation and showed the Indians the "exercising of the arms," an activity in which they marched in formation and fired their muskets. 

The Wampanoag put on their own display of dancing and chanting for the Pilgrims.

There was so much that was interesting to see that I scarcely knew which direction to look. But for sure I felt a mood of joy and thanksgiving to their merciful Lord who had brought them through. I felt the same way!!

The celebration would last several days. But when time came for everyone to turn in, there was no place for me to sleep. So I decided to slip away, knowing no one would even remember I was there.

So I pulled on the rope and came back to the present day. I was feeling so good to have celebrated the first Thanksgiving as an l8 year old. And now I wish you all in 2012 a...HAPPY THANKSGIVING.  
                                      

.
By the way, the people I saw for the most part wore colorful clothes and did not have silver buckles on their shoes....at least that is how I remember it...But I think the pictures are cute anyway.

vv


love, annie in memphis

                    

*************************************************************************

HANGING OUT WITH FRIENDLY INDIANS, Nov. 1621

November, 1621


  Before the feast began I had an opportunity to talk with: Mary Chilton (14), Constance Hopkins (13 or 14), Priscilla Mullins (19), Elizabeth Tilley (14 or15).
Soon they were needed to help the women bring out the food. I noticed that there were many more Wampanoag Indians ...90...than there were Pilgrims...53. Their chief Maisasoit was there also. 

Four Pilgrim men had gone out and killed enough fowl to
last three days.  Turkeys were also caught.The Indians brought deer to add to the feast. It is believed that Maisasoit and the Wampanoage Indians kept the Pilgrims from starving during those early years.

Squanto,  from Patuxet tribe, was most helpful in teaching the Pilgrims after the first winter. He taught the pilgrims to plant corn. 

He had learned English while he was captured one time, but that is another story. 

Priscilla pointed him out sitting with Pilgrims and other Indians waiting to eat. I knew from history that Squanto would die at 37; and it was sad knowing that, as I looked at him.



Although the Indians and Pilgrims couldn't understand each other, it was amazing how well they got along.  



   Happily, nobody seemed to think it was odd that I was there soaking it all in. But this is MY DREAM, after all!!!

 
In the next entry I will share what I remember about the entertainment and the feast.
Til then, love, annie in memphis
*******************************************************

HANGING OUT WITH PILGRIMS November 1621

Well, dear Friends, out there...I often think of you and wonder who and where you are...but enjoy knowing strangers read my blog.

 I have decided it might take the rest of my life to finish DON QUIXOTE. So as I was contemplating the chapter XXII, when Don Quixote was lowered by rope down into a cave...and while resting on a crevice he had a dream or an awake experience. I found myself being lowered into  past history to 1621; then I had a dream or an awake experience hanging out with Pilgrims. It was so amazing. I did not go to Plymouth as the old lady I am today but as a 18 year old girl. I  hoped to spend the whole three days of festivities there (as Don Quixote spent three days in the Montesinos cave.) 

Once I opened my eyes in Plymouth I was thrilled at  being present at the first Thanksgiving. I did not hear anyone use the word Thanksgiving but Harvest Celebration Day.

The Thanksgiving meal had not been served yet, when I arrived. 
I found myself in conversation with Priscilla Mullins. 

Around 19 years old, she was so pretty and yet so strong. Life had been hard since she first set sail on the Mayflower. The trip was arduous; people were seasick. The ship was dark. It stank. The ship was not comfortable for passengers because it was actually a cargo ship used to transport wine. 
They arrived in December  and then during a devastating winter of  bitter cold and snow, half the members who arrived died from sickness. Priscilla was the only one of her family who lived through it. As she shared her life with me, there was nothing self pitying about her.I asked her where she lived since her family died. She answered that she lived with several families. So she had no definite home....

I asked Priscilla if she had any duties. She said that she spun wool and flax, taught children and helped with the cooking. For the Harvest Feast she plucked the fowl and got covered in feathers before the job was done!!

I told Priscilla that I thought we were having a Thanksgiving Day celebration.

 She said that this was a Harvest Day celebration the way they had back in England at the end of harvest. She said they had such a big harvest their leaders wanted them to do this. 

Priscilla continued, "Of course we are a religious people and are very  thankful. But this particular event is more like a party
with games, secular songs and feasting." 

I didn't tell Priscilla that in 2012 Americans still remember it as the first Thanksgiving in our country!!! 

She could not know that 242 years later a president named Abraham Lincoln would declare a day of Thanksgiving as a regular holiday for our country along with Christmas. Even though the Civil War was going on, he wanted us to give "Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens." 


We stood outdoors talking. The feasting and fun and games would take place outdoors. I can't tell you how moved I was to be there. 

 While we were talking other girls walked up to us. One was Mary Chilton, in her mid teens, thought to be first passenger  to set foot ashore from the Mayflower.

Interesting that I heard that handsome John Alden was the first to step ashore. Who knows? 

I was so glad to meet her. Then came Constance Hopkins. Her half brother was the only baby born on the Mayflower!! She and Mary were younger than Priscilla and me. But life had given them more maturity than you would expect from their years. With Constance was Elizabeth Tilley. She also lost her parents, an uncle and aunt during that bitter winter. She was taken in by the Carver family. I heard there was a teen age servant girl, Dorothy; but I did not get a chance to meet her.

There were some teenage boys, but I only saw them and didn't have conversation with anyone except the girls.


 I knew already what they could not know in the future.. I had read from history that they all would marry and have large families. These girls would live roughly to the age I am now.

Of course one marriage was most famous because of the Longfellow poem. Everyone knows Priscilla married John Alden. He did not talk with us. But I admired him from afar  as he stood and talked with some other men.
                                

If Priscilla was already in love with him I could not tell. 

John Alden was a Mayflower cooper and was only hired for a year; but he decided to stay on in this new place...and the rest is, well "history!"

  
Of course Priscilla could not yet know about this house where she and John would live one day.

I enjoyed being young again. I was about to start my freshman year in college, and Priscilla could not read!! Yet she was so much wiser than I ever have been or will be.  

The girls left to help the adult women to start bringing out the food. I looked around and saw there were more Indians there than Pilgrims. There were only about 53 Pilgrims left.  There was a general feeling of good will between the two groups. I didn't talk with anyone except the teenage girls so far.

THE 53 PILGRIMS AT THE FIRST THANKSGIVING :

4 MARRIED WOMEN : Eleanor Billington, Mary Brewster, Elizabeth Hopkins, Susanna White Winslow.
5 ADOLESCENT GIRLS : Mary Chilton (14), Constance Hopkins (13 or 14), Priscilla Mullins (19), Elizabeth Tilley (14 or15) and Dorothy, the Carver's unnamed maidservant, perhaps 18 or 19.
9 ADOLESCENT BOYS : Francis & John Billington, John Cooke, John Crackston, Samuel Fuller (2d), Giles Hopkins, William Latham, Joseph Rogers, Henry Samson.
13 YOUNG CHILDREN : Bartholomew, Mary & Remember Allerton, Love & Wrestling Brewster, Humility Cooper, Samuel Eaton, Damaris & Oceanus Hopkins, Desire Minter, Richard More, Resolved & Peregrine White.
22 MEN : John Alden, Isaac Allerton, John Billington, William Bradford, William Brewster, Peter Brown, Francis Cooke, Edward Doty, Francis Eaton, [first name unknown] Ely, Samuel Fuller, Richard Gardiner, John Goodman, Stephen Hopkins, John Howland, Edward Lester, George Soule, Myles Standish, William Trevor, Richard Warren, Edward Winslow, Gilbert Winslow.

William Bradford, Of Plimoth Plantation :
In the original 17th century spelling
"They begane now to gather in ye small harvest they had, and to fitte up their houses and dwellings against winter, being all well recovered in health & strenght, and had all things in good plenty; fFor as some were thus imployed in affairs abroad, others were excersised in fishing, aboute codd, & bass, & other fish, of which yey tooke good store, of which every family had their portion. All ye somer ther was no want.  And now begane to come in store of foule, as winter approached, of which this place did abound when they came first (but afterward decreased by degrees).  And besids water foule, ther was great store of wild Turkies, of which they tooke many, besids venison, &c. Besids, they had about a peck a meale a weeke to a person, or now since harvest, Indean corn to yt proportion.  Which made many afterwards write so largly of their plenty hear to their freinds in England, which were not fained,  but true reports."

In my next blog entry I will tell you about the Indians who came to the first Thanksgiving celebration. I was just fascinated as I watched these 90 men so different from the Pilgrims in many ways.
.love, annie in memphis


*************************************************************************

WHY PHILIPPI? #7 REHASHING TRIP AT HOME IN KITCHEN

So now we are back in Memphis...have been home several days. We decided to get together again this morning to rehash our very 
short but very exciting trip to Greece. So it was so sweet sitting at the kitchen table with Dorothea and Beanie, my old friends from Humes High School. We are all 79, all widows, all treasure each others' friendships.

We drank coffee and passed around postcards and snapshots, commenting on everything we could remember connected with each one.


    

Then I told them I had some fresh news from Larry. Larry graduated from Humes with us. He never knew he was the class
nerd. But no matter. He ended up leading the most exciting life of anyone in our class of 1951 as a CIA agent.
 (I guess the overall winner has to be Elvis but he was not in our class but two years behind us.)

 But Ben and I got to know Larry very well on the Poland and Geneva pretend trips; he was a major character in both. So when we returned, I called him to see if he could find out anything about the victim in our bathroom in Kavala.  As I expected,  he called this morning to tell us he has found news he had gotten from his son who now is following in Larry's footsteps in the CIA.

The victim was a double agent who had been tracked down and eliminated by agents from another country which Larry was not allowed to disclose to us. The assassins were caught and arrested. 

Of course Greece is a fer piece from Memphis, but I feel safer now knowing the case is settled. However, it will be a long time before we can forget that dead body on the floor of our extra bathroom!

But the most important part of our coffee time was that Dorothea brought her love letter from her husband and shared it with us for the first time.
                                 
                                 
                                         June-1972

                                "My  beloved Dorothea,
                     I am having such a wonderful time with my
                     men's study group from church back home.
                    We are learning so much about Paul as we
                     study his mission trips. How I love him and
                     and his books in the Bible. Today we are in
                     Philippi. I find that I miss you so much that 
                     I am writing this as a love letter to you. I will
                     hide it behind a certain stone.  Some day soon
                     we will come here together and enjoy all the wonder
                     of this place and retrieve this love letter to my true 
                     love. You didn't think your old man had it in him.     
                     I love you more than I can ever say and will forever. 
                                   Always your Gleekamoo!"
*****************************************************
As you know already, Blog Friends, her husband died that very day from a heart attack in Philippi. Dorothea received a postcard from him  a week later, telling her he had hidden a love letter. He put an x on this postcard where it was. (x not seen)

But it had been collected and stored at the museum in one of many boxes of things gathered by the grounds keepers. 

How marvelous the three of us feel...that we FOUND IT in one of those boxes just hours before we flew home. !!!
*****************************************************

It was such an honor that Dorothea shared this with Beanie and me.
Now we share it with you. What could be more important than to be loved and to love.

So ends the final entry on WHY PHILIPPI?

Ο Θεός να σας ευλογεί σας

O Theós na sas ev̱logeí sas     God bless you!

With love from Beanie, Dorothea, and annie

****************************************************
                 

HANGING OUT WITH DON QUIXOTE MOVING EVER SO SLOWLY!

 

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

The Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547-1616) is the greatest novelist of the Spanish language. His masterpiece, "Don Quixote," is one of the most important and influential books in the history of the novel.

           
Yesterday I went to the library to see if I could find a copy of Don Quixote with a little larger print than the one I have at 
home. 

A young woman asked if she could help me. I told her about my mission to read the half million words of this book my husband had taught in college. 

 She asked where. I answered University of Memphis. She asked his name. I told her, Dr. William B. Brewer.  She said she had majored in Spanish and he was her teacher and she loved him. She was so happy I brought back a sweet memory for her. We had (what I frequently have) a sweet for the moment bonding!!! That was surely a blessing moment for me.

I love pretending I am invisibly traveling with Don Quixote. His exploits make perfect sense to me, because I am on the weird side myself.

I would say my own "pretend" trips helped to prepare me for this adventure, but actually pretending for fun started back in my childhood. Plike!! (Play like!) was the most fun of anything my friends and I did. We would act out the most complicated stories, making them up as we went along.

It pleases me to know that, although Cervantes was a late bloomer (around 50 before he had a success in writing) this work was enormously popular. Everyone wanted to read it!!

Maybe more, maybe not. Maybe you should just read the book for yourself. It will surprise you to see how this book written in the early l7th century delights you. (1605 and 1615!!) 
Love, annie in memphis

*****************************************************
old7lady9blogger80@gmail.com
*****************************************************

HANGING OUT WITH DON QUIXOTE

                                        
With much excitement I am beginning a new project. 

I am reading DON QUIXOTE!!! Every word.


 I had always thought it would be so intellectual and dry; I find this parody is quite wonderful. And it is easy to see why it is considered a masterpiece and has sold more copies than any book next to the Bible!

Here is why I decided to do this: Beanie "made me do it!"

If you read my pretend trip to Barrow, Alaska, 

     (on annieinmemphis.blogspot.com,)

you met the friend I made up but came to love: Beanie. 

     I put her in three pretend trips:
     Barrow, Alaska, Treasure Hunt
    (Argentina) and most recently 
     Why Philipi?

Anyway she sort of took on a life of her own.

I remember standing by her looking at the Arctic Ocean. She was speaking to the memory of her late husband, Tom.

"Well, I'm here Tom, seeing this wonderful sight you always wished I would come with you to see. Now I'm here and its for you, Tom."

Perhaps somewhere in my subconscious, I put those words in her mouth...because 7 mos later I too, would become a widow like Beanie.

Ben taught Spanish Medieval Literature among other things. DON QUIXOTE was a work he especially loved to teach. I had only read excerpts, but I put off reading the whole work.

Add caption

I thought the only copy in our home was the large book in Spanish. This week I found  one in English. And in it I found notes in pencil suggesting paintings Ben planned to do (and did) from that story. 

So I am reading it now...and like Beanie..doing this tribute with pleasure.

When I can, I will post the paintings Ben did of scenes from Don Quixote. 


I will be on the blog and face book less for the time being, while I am hanging with Don Quixote!!
More later, with love, annie in memphis
*********************************************