Daughter Susy, granddaughter Josie, and I just got home from Costco with the car stuffed with the turkey and the fixings for our Thanksgiving meal. While we were plowing our carts through the store – everybody in the county seemed to have joined us – and afterwards, putting all the stuff away at home, my mind kept drifting toward the Fitzpatrick side of our family.

It will be a bleak Thanksgiving this week for everybody who loved my nephew, Dennis. His Requiem Mass and burial were held Thursday in Iowa. His death was unexpected, and way too soon. This won’t be a week of much celebration for his family and his siblings.

But the Fitzpatricks know how to face hardship and sorrow, and they’ll manage it with their usual forbearance. You can count on their gentle Irish humor and their resilience to sustain themselves, and everyone around them.

As for me, I’m just going to keep remembering them all as they were when it was the best of times. I started digging through my old blobs hoping I’d remember cranking one out about one of their Thanksgiving holidays. The only one I found is this kinda goofy one about a Thanksgiving dinner Dennis’s big brother Tim and his wife Denise hosted in 2010 for a few members of the family.

The blob is really about the antics of my nephew Tim, but I especially like seeing the photo of the guests present for their Thanksgiving Day dinner. My nieces René and Denise and their families weren’t present for this turkey dinner 12 years ago, and niece Chris was taking the photo, so you won’t see her, but Dennis is alive and well in it, (he’s the one at lower center front) and I really like looking at it today. Their usual clowning, laughing and horsing around don’t show in the photo but that’s what always happened when they were together.

Here’s the blob: https://goingon80.com/2010/12/22/107-timothy-the-terrible-elf/

And please check out Tim’s “Comment” that follows the blob. He’s always had a knack for using his Irish humor to try to sneak in the last word. (Nice try, Timothy).