Mendel Letters 7: COVID Thanksgiving

Hard copies of these typed letters were discovered in an old camp trunk in the basement storage facility of one of the few buildings that remain standing in this Brooklyn neighborhood. The building is quite decrepit and is scheduled for demolition. The letters were found in November 2048 by a teenager who believes they were written by his great-grandfather. The letters are addressed to Mendel, the letter writer’s father, who appears to have been dead for at least six years when his son, whose name we are unsure of, started to write him. The son appears very agitated in some of the letters. With permission from the family, we are publishing them on the date they were written, only 28 years later.

November 29, 2020

Dear Mendel,

Sorry I haven’t written for a while. This was truly a weird Thanksgiving. Because of COVID isolation, only two of us were eating at home, so we down-sized our bird from turkey to Cornish hen. I baked four apple pies and delivered them to the kids earlier in the week, but they ate them long before their Thanksgiving dinners. The nicest part of the day, while we were eating, some of the family was on Zoom, another one of those Internet Sci-Fi magic tricks, so we could pretend we were eating together. What a world.

Keeping with tradition, President Trump “pardoned” a turkey at a White House ceremony. The rumor is that after the ceremony Trump pulled the turkey aside and asked it to return the favor and pardon him. Apparently, the turkey said “NO!”

Your son