Turkey soup

It would have been around now that my father would make the turkey soup. The recipe he'd use was his mother's, a woman who gave birth to him late in her life and who I never met, my father having not married until he was thirty-two, fairly late for men of his era.

Turkey soup.

His mother would have either learned the recipe or developed it on her own when she was a girl, meaning that the soup I'd have had direct oral roots in the nineteenth century. 
Dad would make it in a big gray pot that then seemed like the kind cannibals use to cook missionaries in New Yorker cartoons but really isn't that large (I still have it). Barley, onions, chopped potatoes, chopped celery, a variety of seasonings, and the turkey carcass, of course. Dad was serious about it but in a joyful way. He liked to cook and would cook more meals than other kids' dads I knew. He enjoyed the simple act of nourishing his children with wholesome food they liked. 
My mother had the standard rivalry with her mother-in-law even after the poor woman's death, so she always found something wrong with the soup, but we sensed the bias and so ignored it. 

Jack LaLanne

Jack LaLanne, the mid-twentieth century diet and health advocate, would advise people not to eat something their grandmother wouldn't have made (he was born in 1914; make it great grandmother now, depending on your age). It was good advice and Jack followed it and lived a healthy ninety-six years, doing his exercise routine up to the day before his death of pneumonia.