The cheerful heart has a continual feast.
~Proverbs 15:15
Our monthly military pay never stretched to the end of the month. We were young newlyweds, expecting our first baby, and living in an old mobile home in Delta Junction, a rural, wilderness town at the end of the Alaska Highway. Large, wild animals roamed freely, and a closet-sized post office and equally small bank bookended the one general store in town.
I shopped on post at the Army commissary once a month, and because of our tight budget, I had to become a very creative cook. We purchased twenty pounds of ground meat, which I shoved into our built-in, dorm-sized fridge with a tiny, ice-crusted freezer.
I learned to prepare hamburger dishes thirty different ways. Often, I made one-pan meals of chili or soups and stews. Rarely did we have poultry or fish, unless you consider cans of no-name, smelly tuna packed in greasy oil a meal.
Mainly, we ate lots of pasta and carb-loaded meals with little meat and lots of tomato sauce. Most goods had to be trucked in from the lower forty-eight states. Dairy products, fruits and vegetables, prescribed as a healthy part of a prenatal diet, were especially costly and out of our price range. I was homesick, not only for my mom, but also for the variety of stores and farmers’ markets back in Missouri, and the accessibility and affordability of fresh fruits and veggies.
Eighteen-hour days of winter darkness arrived in November. On our monthly shopping trip to the commissary, I planned ahead for our Thanksgiving dinner. I bought less ground beef and purchased one fat roasting chicken, which I stuffed into our tiny freezer. I also purchased a package of Pepperidge Farm dry stuffing mix and a can of cranberry sauce for our big meal. We invited our neighbors, Karen and Bob, a young military couple from Oregon.
All month long, I eagerly awaited our Thanksgiving get-together.
I rose early on Thanksgiving morning, pried the frozen poultry from the freezer, and thawed it. I washed and salted the hollow cavity and stuffed it with sage dressing. I smeared butter on the breast of the roasting hen and popped it into our twenty-inch, propane-fueled oven.
Half an hour into the baking, I peeked in. The light bulb illuminated a raw chicken in a barely lukewarm oven. I fiddled with the knobs and called my husband, who went outdoors to check the twenty-pound propane tank.
I knew before he announced it that the tank was empty. We didn’t have enough money to refill it. Our friends and neighbors were as impoverished as we were, so borrowing money was out of the question. I dug deep into the bottom of my purse and rummaged through the couch cushions. Together, we came up with ninety-seven cents — not even a dollar. Three days before payday and flat broke, we drove to the service station on the main highway and asked the owner, an older gray-haired man who hustled out to greet probably his only customers, if he could please fill our small cylinder with just under a dollar’s worth of propane.
“You kids stationed at Fort Greely? How long have you been up here? This your first Thanksgiving?” His exhaled words crystallized in mid-air, and he rubbed his hands together to warm them. The town’s population was just over 500, and any newcomer was usually a military family. Many were young newlyweds, as we were, a year out of high school, and unfamiliar with the hazards of the large, free-roaming wild animals and the deep-freeze climate conditions. Spouses who joined their soldiers at the top of the world were required to take a survival training class on how to prevent frostbite and avoid serious situations. At that moment, though, our most serious situation was having no way to cook our Thanksgiving meal.
The man tugged his fur-lined cap out of his pocket and pulled it down around his ears. He lifted our small propane tank from the trunk and said, “Hold on there a minute. See what I can do for you. Just under a dollar will get you through to payday, you say?”
I was so thrilled that I clapped my hands. “Oh, thank you, sir. I have the bird in the oven, and the oven went cold.” I was too embarrassed to tell him our bird weighed less than five pounds and was a chicken, not a turkey.
He walked to the propane tank to dispense fuel. I watched the gauge register fifty cents, sixty-five cents, and when it surpassed a dollar, I panicked. “Tell him to stop filling!”
Before we could get the window rolled back down, the man turned to put our tank in the car. I dropped ninety-seven cents into his calloused hand and said, “I’m sorry, sir. You filled it, but we don’t even have a dollar to pay you.” I expected he would remove the small tank because there was no way to return the unpaid fuel.
With a genuine smile on his kind face, he said, “You kids have a nice Thanksgiving, and don’t worry about it.” If I had been outdoors, my tears would have frozen on my cheeks.
We thanked him for his generosity and promised to bring four dollars and three cents on payday to repay our debt. He waved us on our way.
I baked that chicken to a golden brown, whipped up instant mashed potatoes, opened cans of green beans and cranberry sauce, and proudly served a feast. As Bob, Karen, my husband and I bowed our heads to say grace, I was especially thankful for the generosity of a stranger with a heart of gold. I am forever grateful for his unexpected kindness as he demonstrated the true meaning of Thanksgiving.
~Linda O’Connell
