Part 2 Here’s what happened to my feast over four years.
**Part 2**
Here’s what happened to my feast over four years. I want to lay it out honestly, because when I tell people the short version I sound like a victim, and I’m not sure I am one.
2022. The first one after Dee. Ainsley called me in July and said, “Russell, let us take some of this off you this year.”
I said okay. Because I could not have done it. I genuinely could not have. I had not been able to open Dee’s closet yet. So they moved it to Timonium. Just for that year, was the understanding.
2023. It stayed in Timonium. There was a tent. A real one. A rental with sides.
2024. There was a caterer doing sides, which meant the corn and the tomatoes were now on a platter with rosemary on it, and a sign at the end of the driveway on an easel that said *The Gorsuch Family Crab Feast* in a nice font on cardstock.
And every year I still drove up at six in the morning with the pot in the back of the truck and steamed for eleven hours. Then around seven at night I’d wash up and sit down at the end of a table with a beer and eat by myself for about twenty minutes and then go home.
Nobody was cruel to me. I want to be clear about that. Nobody ever said one unkind word. I just slowly became the guy who works the pot.
And I let it happen. And I let it happen. And I let it happen. Because every single individual step was reasonable. And because the alternative was making a thing out of it. And men my age from where I’m from would rather be quietly erased than make a thing out of it.
If you have ever watched something you built get gradually improved into somebody else’s, you know it never happens in one move. It’s always forty small favors. And every time you go along with one, you’re voting. And you don’t know you’re voting.
Last year, 2024, at about six-thirty in the evening, Keith clinked a glass and did the thing he does now: the little welcome. Thanks everybody for coming. Then he handed it to me, which he’d never done before. I think he meant it kindly.
I stood up with a beer in my hand in front of about seventy people under a rented tent. I meant to say two sentences.
I said, “Three years ago on Thursday, Dee sat at my kitchen table and told me she wasn’t going back to dialysis.”
And then I couldn’t do the second sentence. I stood there for probably eleven seconds. I got out, “She’d have liked the tent,” which she absolutely would not have. And I sat down.
Eleven seconds. That’s it. That’s the entire crime.
Somebody’s kid started crying because grown-ups crying scares children. There was a little hole in the evening for about five minutes. Then it filled back in the way things do. Nobody said anything to me about it. Two women came over and put a hand on my shoulder.
Eleven months later, in August, my daughter-in-law told me on speakerphone that I made people uncomfortable.
Tuesday the twelfth of August. Two-forty in the afternoon. I was in the garage putting a new gasket on the keg lid, which I do every year in August.
She said, “Russell, I want to talk to you about September before it gets close.”
I said okay.
She laid it out very organized. She’s always organized. They were capping it at forty this year. A curated list, she said. Sit-down. Assigned seating. No alley. No walk-ups. And they’d hired a crew. An outfit out of Essex that does crab steaming. They bring their own rig. They do weddings.
So I said, “Well then what do you want me to bring?”
And she said, “Honestly, Russell, we think it’d be better if you sat this one out.”
I want to describe what happened in me right then. It wasn’t anger. It was a kind of falling sensation, like when you go down a step you didn’t know was there. My hand was on that keg lid and I remember I gripped it.
I said, “Sat it out.”
She said last year got heavy. Some people found it uncomfortable. And with the smaller list and the new format, she just thought it was cleaner.
Cleaner.
I said, “That’s my mother-in-law’s tablecloth on those tables. That’s Walt’s pot. That’s my wife’s. That’s thirty-four years.”
And she said it the way you’d say it to a vendor. Not vicious.
“I understand. But things evolve, Russell. Everything can’t stay 1991 forever.”
Then she said she had a two-forty-five and she’d call me later in the week.
She hung up.
I stood in my garage with a gasket in my hand.
Then I did something fast, without thinking, which is not usually how I do things.
I went inside and got my laptop.
Because here’s the part that hadn’t come up on that phone call. Not once.
I was paying for it.
The tent: twelve hundred and forty, deposit already down on my Visa, because in 2023 Ainsley called and said the rental place needed a card on file and mine was the one they had from the year before. The porta-john. Three hundred ten. The rental chairs and the eight-foot tables. Five ninety. The caterer for the sides: a thousand deposit against a thirty-two-hundred total. The crab order at the place on Eastern Avenue—deposit down, my name on it, my name on it since 1991. The man’s son runs it now and he still calls me Mr. Rusty.
And the steaming crew from Essex, which I had not known about until nine minutes earlier.
Nine hundred deposit. Paid on my card.
They had booked a crew to replace me with my money.
And then they had told me not to come.
