Special to the Times/News

Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday. Maybe because it revolves around food. And family. And fending off the daunting winter gloom with feasting and festivity. Plus, what other holiday comes with an automatic four-day weekend?

As kids, we always went downtown on Thanksgiving with all my cousins to the Washington Athletic Club, courtesy of my grandparents, who were members. A sumptuous banquet awaited us in our own suite, with white linen tablecloths, unlimited Roy Rogers and Shirley Temples, and someone else cooking the turkey and doing the dishes (perks I would appreciate more in later years). Thanksgiving 1964 we watched wide-eyed from our perch on the umpteenth floor as the dark sky exploded with a million cartwheeling snowflakes, then scampered home to find our modest Burien Gardens bungalow magically transformed into a glistening white palace.

But it wasn't until I went off to college and could not make it home for Thanksgiving that I realized how much the gathering meant to me. Luckily, Tom, my roommate, took pity and brought me home with him to Lincoln, Mass., on at least three Thanksgivings.

Like mine, his was a big family, with plenty of sisterly antics and brotherly horsing around, and that feeling of family, of BELONGING, helped muffle my homesickness.

Tom's sister asked me if Seattle was where the "Needle Pin" was. I made small talk with eccentric Uncle Horace (every family has one, don't they?), a world-renowned expert on (no kidding) the sex lives of lobsters. (Well, someone has to be, don't they?)

After dinner, at which the men and boys, in the time-honored New England tradition, all donned skinny black neckties, we all took the customary walk around the "neighborhood"-- through fields and woods, over broken-down walls of mossy boulders, along the edges of ponds already slick with ice, down to the town center where a lively square dance was in full swing.

One year I answered an ad in the Student Employment Center from a woman who needed a ride to Connecticut to have Thanksgiving dinner with her friend. The woman's name was Judith Painter and she was a quadriplegic. I was understandably nervous driving her van on busy I-95. But I got her to Stonington just fine.

Her friend, who managed a coastal antique shop out of her home, put up the "Closed" sign and fixed something called a "New England Boiled Dinner." (I think because all of the flavor has been boiled out of it). She got an "A" for effort, but it only made me miss my old favorites -- turkey, gravy, stuffing, cranberries, pumpkin pie -- that much more.

More important, though, was that Thanksgiving that year, and Ms. Painter's strength and courage, drove home for me just how very much I had to be thankful for. At the end of that long day, Ms. Painter thanked me, and said that my chauffeuring had provided "the smoothest ride" she had ever had.

"My pleasure," I said -- and it was, because it means a lot when someone puts their trust in you. That was nearly 30 Thanksgivings ago, but one I'll never forget.

So, whether you're far from home or surrounded by family and friends this year, my wishes for you this Thanksgiving are these: that the true spirit of the day fill your heart; that you know what it's like to be trusted (especially if you're the one cooking the turkey); and that you get that second piece of pumpkin pie.