A Thanksgiving Without Visitors at the Table : Thousand Oaks: Senior citizens at a residential care home reminisce and make the best of the holiday without families.

From the head of the long table, Sarah stood up on her two wobbly legs, balanced herself with a cane and cheerfully denounced the Thanksgiving dinner.

“This table setting was really bad,” she chided a staff member of a Thousand Oaks care home. “People were cramped and couldn’t breathe.”

The 77-year-old woman’s opinions, as well as her Brooklyn accent, were strong despite the fact that she’s gone through five recent medical operations.

Sarah was one of the 35 residents of Thousand Oaks Residential Care Home who congregated in the linoleum-floored dining room to eat Thanksgiving dinner, away from their families.

As sunlight flooded the dining room that overlooked a hillside, residents made the best of their holiday loneliness, moving around in wheelchairs and walkers. A few blew each other kisses and waved hellos.

Visiting families had thinned their ranks, whisking away many of the 88 resident senior citizens to eat the traditional dinner elsewhere. Those remaining had nowhere else to go. Each had a story, often about distant experiences, that bubbled forth on a holiday that often stirs the memory.

A radio played Top 40 music, enjoyed most by the young staff of attendants. Most of the residents ate their turkey, cranberry sauce, rolls and string beans in silence.

Some broke the silence to recall stories from long ago. Childhood memories often seemed easier to recollect than the more recent, painful events that led them to the full-care home.

“I always felt sorry for the turkey. It was my pet,” said Ann Saner, 87, a retired English and history teacher who keeps a kitten, Gypsy, in the residential home. She said she grew up on a cattle ranch in Texas where she watched over the cows while her father cared for her sick mother.

“There was once a calf caught in a stream,” Saner said suddenly, launching into a story about her experience as a frightened girl of 14. “I made a fire to keep it warm and I fought off the coyotes all night. They were close enough that the fire was reflected in their eyes,” she said.

Claudine Pinkston, 78, wanted to tell a stranger about growing up in Michigan. “They make lumber where I live,” she said as she sipped grape juice. “They cut lumber all day long.”

Sarah, who wouldn’t give her last name, said she never married because as a supervisor in a Los Angeles shoe factory, she didn’t need a husband for financial support. She said she came to the care facility a year ago after a fight with her sister, whom she lived with for years.

“My sister slapped me in the face and called me a cripple,” Sarah said. “Living here is better than living with her.”

For another man also without visiting family, the Thanksgiving meal was a pleasant event, and he described the people at the facility as “marvelous.”

Until two months ago, the well-dressed man said, “I never felt my age.”

But that ended when he fell in the bathroom and broke his back. “It’s difficult to endure,” said the man, 87, a retired automobile dealer who requested anonymity. “I’m looking to get well and find a comfortable place to live and live out the rest of my life.”