"the shopping for thanksgiving was very lovely and it was cold out.  i took my shopping cart and arthur who lived next door i mean in the next apartment and we went to all these stores on the east side.  there was at that time a vegetable market on east houston street, more expensive than the other east side vegetable markets, but very good, with everything very fresh, and i bought yams and mushrooms and fennel and millions of salad things and avocados and chestnuts to cook with everything.  already i had the turkey and sausage and all the italian goodies, the olives, alici, and the spices my forty eight of them in test tubes in test tube racks marshalled at home.  then arthur and i squeezed into the tiniest cheese store it had two other costumers and it was overcrowded, i have noticed more cheese stores are like that are tiny like that, cheese stores and bread stores and no other kind of store.  we bought fromage de brie and very good crumbly provolone and something new to me called kashkaval, cause the man said taste it and i did and it was marvelous.  and then did i have enough apples and pears for the cheese so we went back to the vegetable store and bought more apples and pears.  the man was taking in mushrooms as big as a fist, baskets of them from his car, but he wouldn't sell them he said they were for himself for his own thanksgiving.  then we bought the wine, some of it, some was coming with people tomorrow and huge loaves of italian bread because the man in the bread store said no he wouldn't open tomorrow and i wondered all the way home how to keep it fresh.  

and i used my icebox and michael's icebox upstairs and arthur's next door because there was so much stuff.  there was really a lot of stuff, o much more than i've said.  and boiled the chestnuts in wine and cooked sausage in spices and left it all standing together for overnight, it would all stuff the turkey.  and the next morning early sara came over with many things among them fresh dill and we made three salads and i baked asparagus and made all the antipastos we used to have at home and finally it was three o'clock and people began to come.

the whole of the living room which was a bedroom became a diningroom with extra tables and there was running back and forth to all the iceboxes and soon we started eating and we ate as i said for nine hours altogether.  grapefruit antipastos turkey mushrooms-and-sour-cream baked-asparagus-with-wine-and-cheese all three salads and yes of course candied yams and cranberry sauce though you weren't supposed to that year the newspapers said, they said the cranberry sauce was sprayed with poison, but then we figured so was everything else and so were we, we ate four cans of cranberry sauce with the turkey.

and sam fell asleep on my bed.  people kept falling asleep and waking up and eating and it got darker and darker and very late.  and a painter came in a girl i used to know a girl i hadn't seen for two years with her child and ate too and i ate so much i remember for the first time in months not feeling cold.  and al who had a show to light got ther finally and said somebody at the theatre stole the walnuts and figs, he was brining the walnuts and figs, and i said thank goodness we'd never eat them anyway.  and we started him off from the first eating everything, eating all the things we had eaten until he caught up.  and then we all got to the pastries and coffee and brandy and panforte and fruit and cheese.

and hugh came in with seth and said martin was sick so we made up a special package with pastries and all kind of goodies to send back to him, and hugh ate some and so did seth and there were three or four conversations going on at once.  seth talked about jail, hugh talked about going to peru, al and rody and sam talked theatre shop.  i kept stopping everybody to tell them to eat more things and tom warner kept trying to put in words about turkey, the country he meant, and nobody listened but he looked very happy.  the baby took off her clothes and sang happy birthday and told us it was a party and we told her yes.  when hugh was leaving we gave him a flower for martin."

--Diane di Prima, Dinners and Nightmares