It is no surprise that just prior to many Thanksgiving Days, I develop crippling back spasms.

It’s a fun time, Thanksgiving. AND it’s a lot of work that requires planning and execution. My wife and I have hosted a large gathering every year since 1994 or so, back in Brooklyn. Our teamwork rules the day. Yesterday was no exception.

But.

At a certain stage of life, bad things happen on big holidays. One Thanksgiving more than 50 years ago, while visiting relatives in Connecticut, my dad suffered a heart attack.

It was not fatal. However, it framed the fragility of my family’s foundation, and at a particularly bad time. I was a teenager lost in anxiety. Viet Nam was heating up. School was overwhelming. My family members were at each other’s throats.

I remember each and every moment of that T-Day visit in a way that I would come to remember the morning (mourning?) of 9/11 thirty years later.

We were about to leave my cousin’s warm, spacious, and well-run home and return 60 miles south to our shithole in the Bronx. My dad sat back down. “Give me a minute,” he said.

He sighed, and slowly got up and put on his coat. “What’s the matter?” my uncle, the doctor, asked.

“I feel nauseous,” he said. We all laughed. My father stuffed his face to the max every Thanksgiving.

Then he sat back down. “I gotta lay down,” he said. My uncle got his medical bag, did a few tests, and got on the phone.

The ambulance took him to the local hospital, where he stayed for the next three weeks. He was stabilized and I was told that he suffered a “mild” heart attack. Typical for WWII vets of the era, proper diet and exercise were hardly watchwords. Statins were yet to become a glimmer in Big Pharma’s eye. He was put on a low-calorie diet and a short leash by his brother, the doctor.

He had to buy an exercise bike. No more subways. No more kishka, hard salami, pastrami, potted meat, black-and-white cookies, sour cream and bananas. No more Raleighs. No more beer!

He got better, while I got worse. While he was away, my home fell apart. My mother was minimally capable in the best of circumstances and my dad’s heart attack proved to be the low tide that revealed all the psychological creepy-crawlies that slithered beneath the surface of her toxic personality.

I would come home from school and my part-time job to see a shambles of a household. My younger sister stayed in her room crying. My mother would lie on the sofa, in the dark, lost in alcohol, crying and watching tv. Roger Grimsby would report the body count from ‘Nam on Eyewitness News. A draft lottery was being finalized.

I felt like the Gene Wilder character in “The Producers” as he moaned “no…way…out…no…way…out….”

Humans are remarkably resilient, or so I’m told. I did my best to salvage the situation. I drove my mother to visit my Dad in Connecticut every week while he was in the hospital. I took care of myself as well. I recommitted to doing well in school, and pulled myself by the bootstraps to advance in life, job after job, year after year, to the point where I can look back now and see how far I’ve come in life, considering the shaky ground from where I started.

It was a slog. I mean, of course, life itself is a slog for most of us. But bad things that happen on holidays tend to take their toll. That particular Thanksgiving created a memory that kneecaps me to this very day.

My back is a little better today, by the way. In fact, I will probably be back in the gym by tomorrow.