That’s how I knew before I knew.
For about fifty years, the fourth Thursday in November has smelled like cinnamon and coffee and butter melting in a pan. Since 1976, when Arthur and I had our first one in that apartment in Oak Park with the radiator that banged.
I came down those stairs at twenty to eight expecting it. I’d gone to sleep the night before with a bag of celery and onions already chopped in the refrigerator because I always do the dressing first thing.
And the house didn’t smell like anything at all.
No television going in the den. No cartoons. No Jack running down the upstairs hall in socks, which he has done every single morning of his nine years on this earth and which his mother has asked him not to do eleven thousand times.
