During my early childhood and through the onset of my teens, after which I covertly rebelled by feigning asthma attacks, Thanksgiving meant an hour and a half trek on the Belt Parkway to the outer rim of Long Island, which at that time, especially in my child's-eye view, was civilization's end.

We were transported en famille, sometimes during blizzards, in an uncle's Studebaker in which we were packed "tight" — three in front, four in back, plus one or two lap-sitters. When the Dramamine failed, there were emergency stops en route between our Brooklyn origination point and journey's end — a trilevel tract home in Huntington Harbor.

Everyone wore their Fifties finery. Hats, gloves, and cultured pearls accented the ladies' knitted suits. Persian lamb coats, spike heels, girdles, and nylon stockings suspended by garters completed the holiday ensembles. The men wore long-sleeved, white-on-white shirts with initialed cufflinks and narrow ties under somber gray suits. Their breast pockets were lined with Havana cigars, which they summarily handed to one another. The two uncles who wore gray felt Fedoras and Masonic rings considered my father a member of the avant-garde because he had a mustache, wore tweeds, smoked a pipe, and voted for Adlai Stevenson. And because he knew his way around Greenwich Village.

We children were garbed to resemble miniature insurance executives at a convention, with our painfully scrubbed necks and ears and our funereal facial expressions.

Upon our arrival in Huntington Harbor there were lipstick-smeared kisses and heavy cheek-pinchings along with the annual tour of the envied suburban house (all the guests lived in urban apartments). We praised gray wool carpeting, wallpaper, and knotty-pine paneling, all intalled in record time by Aunt Lil, who was a hyperactive do-it-yourselfer.

But if a guest was more than 15 minutes overdue, there was much worrying, followed by frenetic phone calls. "We're ready to start eating," came the anxious missive from the great-aunt standing nearest the stove. "You're holding everyone up," my grandmother always added, causing latecomers to drive 90 miles an hour (with Long Island police on their heels) in order to assuage the alarmists. "Better you should get a speeding ticket than show up after the celery and olives are served," warned a subconscious chorus. Even my Uncle Mort, who braved foul weather all the way down from Boston each year, arrived by 2:00 p.m.

After we children had ruined our appetities on Barricini's chocolates and salted cashews and the adults each nursed their two-ounce shot glass of Chivas Regal, everyone was seated, banquet style, at three long, narrow tables covered with white linen cloths.

Because Aunt Lil prided herself on packing in bodies rather than paying attention to cuisine, accolades were attaned by mathematics alone. Like the polite sidewalk observers in "The Emperor's New Clothes," we applauded unembellished yams, the most prosaic carrots and peas Del Monte could process, and we cheered a dry bird which had neither eye appeal nor aroma. Only the canned cranberry sauce was commendable.

This modified Norman Rockwell slice, with its mild Eastern European intonation, was replete with thick Cuban cigar smoke and Uncle Harold sneaking down to the basement to escape the annual showing of home moves of past Thanksgivings. There in the dim light on a rinky-dink upright whose yellowed keys matched his dental work, Uncle Harold played the "Twelfth Street Rag" over and over again with a lit cigar protruding from his lips. When the music stopped, my father sometimes stood on his head, yoga-style, while the children scrambled for the coins that tumbled from his pants pocket. And when the coins ran out, there were Mexican jumping beans and magic card tricks. Never, though, was the television set turned on.

On the way back to Brooklyn, with the car windows sealed, the heater running full strength, bumper-to-bumper traffic, more cigar smoke, and my belly bursting with too many helpings of double-crust apple pie topped with vanilla ice cream, the inevitable indigestion began. My discomfort terminated only within sight of the decaying old neighborhood where three generations of Garsons were living.

Many Thanksgivings spent in areas geographically and spiritually remote from those white and gray Novembers in Huntington Harbor have accumulated — in tropical Florida, for instance, during a hurricane when the power went out while I was nursing two-week-old Wendy. In Connecticut, when 11-month-old Lisa took her first stumbling steps and we celebrated the milestone with new neighbors at a potluck Thanksgiving dinner next door. In Guadalajara, Mexico, where the honored bird was dubbed pavo and was garnished with eye-watering chilis and four-year-old Mark was recovering noisily in a nearby bedroom from an emergency appendectomoy. And in a seedy, deserted Chinese restauarnat in Tucson, where the shrimp Cantonese in lobster sauce was divine. And in the Vieux Carre in New Orleans, where the air was moist with mint and bourbon and the boy from the Bronx and I walked arm in arm on the docks of the Mississippi River, drinking strong coffee laced with chicory while we discussed the logistics of getting a divorce. That night the sounds of Al Hirt followed our footsteps on the cobblestones throughout the courtyards of the old quarter, and later, the clickety-click-click of stiletto heels and hushed Creole voices heard from our hotel balcony postponed the decision.

And then there was the dreary Thankgiving in Las Vegas, alone with the children, where the long lines were grim at the Silverbird Hotel's drab buffet, the food institutional, and the incessnat rain induced me to forfeit half a paycheck to the slot machines in teh lobby.

Last year, since all my immediate family now resides in the same city, all of us were invited to Mother's for Thanksgiving dinner — along with many of the characters (none of whom had ever met us or each other before) she had collected during her six-year residency in San Diego. Also included was my brother's former common-law wife, Charley, with their progeny, Benjy, and Charley's new husband and infant daughter, who all drove down from Los Angeles (along with Charley's mother) in record time.

Mother greeted her guest barefoot. She stood in the doorway of her circa 1940 Burlingame home with its Spanish arches, wearing a Peruvian kaftan complimented by an exotic Egyptian pendant and a ring on nearly every finger. Her get-up foreshadowed the production that followed.

Although the fare was traditional (save for the unpopular spinach pies I contributed and the unsuccessful liver pate, which was alchemized with chicken fat and spiked with curry) and no one turned on the football game even though my son, Mark, had five dollars on it, the old-timers were gone, along with their tobacco and their business-suit demeanor. The new cast was more Lear than Rockwell.

The entertainment that accompanied the coffee and brandy bore no resemblance to the predictability of Uncle Harold's clandestine "Twelfth Street Rag." An amateur graphologist misinterpreted all our handwriting, to no one's amusement but his own. A fragile-looking septuagenarian whose royalties from pornography books written under a pseudonym kept her in wine and golf balls, sang dreary Richard Dyer Bennett ballads a cappella. Mother, who generally puts in more kitchen time than she approves of, read outdated Women's Liberatti from a borrowed collection of Judith Viorst poetry. A married couple named Daisy and Irving took turns telling anecdotes about their promiscuous pets Wendy reluctantly read a stanza of one of Shel Silverstein's epic Playboy poems, after which a computer analyst named Earl plucked corrida melodies on a classical guitar.

When my son Mark, now nearly six feet, two inches tall and a teacher's aide at Serra Mesa Elementary School, began a boisterous interpretation of a Southern revivalist preacher, his older sister Lisa cranked up her Karmann Ghia and bolted for the beach, all which point my asthmatic breathing became audible. But what eventually heralded the death knell to the entertainment segment of Family Thanksgiving '80 was my brother's unveiled threat to read aloud the juiciest, most explicitly scatological passage he could extract from his dog-eared copy of Portnoy's Complaint.

It is autumn now, 1981. The neighborhood trees are unadorned, their twigs bending. I am no longer hurrying around the corner for something which is never there. My older children have traveled halfway around the world visiting cities of which I have only dreamed. Mirrors tell me my once-thick curly hair no longer needs thinning or straightening. This afternoon I am being consulted about the suitability of Breuer dining room chairs for the College Avenue apartment Lisa now shares with Bruno. Bruno, this smiling, 25-year-old surfer with a Swiss-German accent, also calls me "Mom," hugs me often and promises strong, beautiful grandchildren.

And this year I am in the vanguard of the mutiny to cancel the family Thanksgiving production altogether in favor of soloing at the typewriter, savoring my salami sandwich, while a tape of the "Twelfth Street Rag," playing over and over, prolongs my reverie.