This is where I brag about my family’s many incredible Thanksgivings, and then cry. We are not a perfect group — we fight and bicker and ignore, we differ on levels personal and political, we see each other less and less — but. But. Thanksgiving we always did right.

As it nearly always does on a California Thanksgiving, the sun shines down on our backyard. A hodgepodge of tables are set up and tableclothed (painstakingly, by my brother and me, under the piercing, critical gaze of my mother), awaiting our annual guests. The cars have been moved out of the driveway to make space for basketball. “The Shack,” our cozy pool house that served as my mom’s workout space and my brother’s and my video game den, is open, with Rock Band, Halo, and Scene It at the ready. The sounds and smells of a night and a day of cooking pervade the house and kitchen, where my dad would explicitly like no assistance whatsoever, including from his mother, who is arriving as she and my grandfather always arrive, precisely fifteen minutes early. They will be shortly followed by the Villas, our closest family friends, who are the only embodiment of aid my parents will willingly accept today. After them, usually, my mom’s mom, “Grandma Keoki” (not her name), carrying with her in the trunk of her tiny, grey, two-door, automatic-seatbelt Toyota the three most important dishes (sorry Dad) of this most important day: yams, rice, and teriyaki chicken. With her arrival, the holiday officially begins.

The fusion Thanksgiving is a well-documented event, one that grows more common every year, though it is no less a beautiful, funny thing for its documentation and commonality. Born into a family of Irish, Scottish, and native Hawaiian roots, both sides proud and concerned with heritage, I’ve known no other kind of Thanksgiving. It was for many years my favorite holiday, no question. The house smelled incredible, I got to see my family (especially my cousins), we’d play movie trivia video games and basketball, and then, we’d eat. Traditionalists love to define: “Thanksgiving is this (turkey, Pilgrims, football), not that (anything else).” But for me, and for many, many others, it is a holiday of “ands,” not “ors,” exemplified by the contents of our plates.

Growing up, the single most popular dish at Thanksgiving amongst all the cousins was Grandma Keoki’s teriyaki chicken. It lived in a soup of sweet and savory sauce, waiting to be plucked from the depths by a dozen eager hands, and dozens more slightly more patient ones. This dish ruled my culinary imagination with an iron fist; nothing else came close. It was, probably up until high school when my palette finally expanded, my single favorite thing to eat in the world.

The word, “Amen” at the end of the pre-meal family prayer served as a starting gun: the cousins would immediately sprint to the enormous stainless stockpot, removing the lid and basking briefly in the sweet aromatic steam that emerged. When it was your turn, you’d first take a scoop of perfectly sticky short grain white rice — the product of a lifetime of rice cooking, much of it with the same rice cooker, a rice that ruined me forever — then, with a slotted spoon, fish out a flat or a drumstick from the teriyaki “soup,” often coming up with just meat or just bones, the chicken had been soaking so long (To this day I have never known anyone else to make teriyaki chicken using wings. I’ve seen wings with teriyaki sauce; but those are a different thing altogether). You’d put your catch directly atop the rice, ladling a little extra sauce along with it. You’d follow with a scoop of buttery, sugary-sweet yams, cooked as long as the chicken to the texture of custard. This was the first course of Collins-Brinton Thanksgiving.

The second course was a bit more traditional. Turkey, stuffing, and Grandma Collins’s Jackie’s potatoes (read: cheesy potatoes), all smothered in gravy. Often there were several options of cream, cheese, or bacon-covered greens, and one (1) salad. This course was just as appreciated as the teriyaki; especially because our turkey was (and still is) actually good. Turkey is an easy bird to fuck up, I know, and so I understand why, for many, it’s their least favorite thing on the Thanksgiving table. “Turkey day? For me, Thanksgiving is all about the sides,” say seven of the least original people you know every year; but for us, the big, roasted bird was still the centerpiece, thanks to my dad’s near-obsession with improving his never-quite-finished recipe. If you were boxing with our Thanksgiving — for some reason — the first course would be the nose-bloodying set-up jab; the second, the knockout cross that’d send you right to sleep.

More chat and more games between the knockout and dessert. The uncles would watch NBA until football came on, when they weren’t asleep. This was prime driveway basketball time, all the better to keep the engines revved, energy up, bodies consuming fuel to make room for pies, pies, pies to come.

One of my favorite things on this day though, even then, was watching my grandmothers chat. Not watching so much, I guess, but glimpsing. I remember that I noticed them, and even as a kid running from the front yard to the back, to the food to the table to The Shack and around again, it always struck me how unlikely a picture they were, sitting comfortably on our garden furniture tucked into the corner. Not because they were at all aloof; because, how different could two people possibly be? My dad’s mom, Claire Williamson, daughter of Irish and Scottish immigrants, raised in Santa Barbara. My mom’s mom, Jane Puapakaki Opunui, Hawaiian through and through, her Maui lineage stretching beyond record. How did they wind up here, in this sunny California backyard, sharing plates of each other’s food and talking and laughing about, honestly, God-knows-what? How did that happen? How was I, of all people, impossibly lucky enough to be loved by them, of all people? I wouldn’t realize, wouldn’t appreciate, until far too far later that they, more than the contents of our plates, represented everything I looked forward to on Thanksgiving.

The third Thursday of November nowadays is a much more intimate affair. A lot of my mom’s family, many of the uncles and aunts and cousins, have moved away. Grandma Keoki passed in early 2020; Grandma Collins in late 2020. But that happens. It’s how it goes. We miss them — two rare fonts of what Christians call “unconditional love”  — and remember fondly when we were together. I think of them often, especially when petty bullshit and family politics and political politics and above all the poison that is social media, and our interpretation of it, threaten to come between us, the ones they left behind. I think of the miraculous “and” they represented — Collins and Brinton, Irish and Scottish and Hawaiian, teriyaki chicken and Jackie’s potatoes, Claire and Jane — and I try to cling to it like a buoy in a storm, sometimes slipping, forgetting, swimming back. They said “and” with their hellos, with their hugs (two better hugs the world hasn’t known, and if it has, then I’d rather not know), and of course with their food. All the nuance in the world is contained in the word, “and;” all lost in the word, “or,” in exclusivity, ultimatum, angered silence. A pretty saying that solves nothing and helps little, but I think is nonetheless mostly true. Except when it’s not. I dunno. They seemed to make our impossible family look so natural, so easy, so inclusive and included, sitting in their corner.

In any case, Grandma Keoki and Grandma Collins inarguably paved the way for many warm sunny autumn backyard days with family made and found. “And” filled our plates with a clashing yet coexisting, and ultimately delicious, heritage. “And” built the lives we continue to live after those who taught us the word moved on. “And” is the intangible thing I always noticed but could never quite pin down, what I saw when I glanced at the grandmas in their corner, what I felt wrap its great, caring arms around my soul when they glanced back at me. “And” is the holiday, still my favorite, along with teriyaki chicken.

For Claire & Jane.