The year was 1975. I was a young missionary, just 19. My American companion and I were working in La Serena, Chile, a quiet provincial town about 8 hours up the highway from Santiago. For the most part, we were the only Americans we ever met in town. It was easy to feel that I was far from my home in family in Arizona. But a few weeks before Thanksgiving we saw something startlingly incongruous in the narrow streets of La Serena. It was an American Motors Gremlin—an odd-looking bubble of a car that was still relatively new in the United States, and unheard of in Chile—with Arizona license plates!
It only took a few seconds to figure out what the Gremlin was doing in La Serena and why it had Arizona plates. In the foothills of the Andes east of town was an astronomic center: not astronomical, astronomic, with telescopes. European and American observatories had installations there, benefiting from the pristine air of that region. And back home in Arizona, there was a similar cluster of telescopes high on a mountain outside Tucson, Arizona. Clearly the car belonged to an observatory employee recently shipped in from Arizona.
La Serena wasn’t all that big a place, and we soon knew where the Gremlin’s home was. Not that it mattered; our ministry was among the locals. But on this particular Thanksgiving Day, my companion and I. missing the trappings and trimmings of the celebration, decided to visit the Gremlin family and say, “Happy Thanksgiving”.
We knocked on the door, and a pleasant American woman answered, clearly somewhat reluctant to deal with two missionaries. I broke the ice. “As a fellow Arizonan, I just wanted to stop by and say Happy Thanksgiving.” She was touched. A conversation started, and before you know it, she was treating us to the most American treat she could offer: peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Real American peanut butter! Not that thick South American wannabe stuff with the oiled pooled on top. (It’s no wonder hey don’t have a taste for peanut butter.) I think it was Jif. We could tell she enjoyed the moment as much as we did.
We never returned to her house. Shortly after that Thanksgiving Day, I received a picture from my family, showing swarms of loved ones eating mounds of food. They had a truly bounteous Thanksgiving, but so did I.
