Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving for the Memories

“Pardon me, if I’m sentimental” – Elvis

I’m generally not a sentimental person in the real world, though I can be maudlin here, but there’s something about the time change and the change in the weather that draws my mind backward in the fall.

When I was a kid, after holiday meals, the men would move to the table in my Mema’s dining room and play a four-person domino game called 42. That game meant a lot to my dad. No doubt it had been a rite of passage for him when he first got to join the game. In my mind, I can see them all still at the little card table; my dad with his granddad, brother and uncle, with a couple of my dad’s cousins standing behind them waiting to join the next hand. I can hear the dominoes tapping the table, the laughter and joyful sound of the men’s voices.

A while back I had a dream that I was in Mema’s living room watching the men play 42 in the other room. Then the room was empty. Then the house was empty, and I was alone. I was sad that they’d never play 42 again, these men who are all now gone. Right before I woke, Mema’s voice told me that I should be happy that it happened, not sad that it won’t happen again.

If you’ve been to this site, you know that Thanksgiving is my high holy day. I’ve had it every way, from large family gatherings to completely alone. The last 23 years, I’ve had it with my own little family, mostly in our own home, though sometimes not. Once we even spent Thanksgiving at Disney World. This year we’ll be celebrating on a different day altogether to accommodate our growing family. If I’m being honest, that small change was, at first, upsetting. That’s more an issue of me becoming a stubborn old man than anything else. I am self-aware enough to have checked that and adjusted course. Now that we’re into November, I’m filled with thanks that we’ll all be together, regardless of the date on the calendar or day of the week.

Here’s what I’ve learned. Everything passes. You never know which Thanksgiving will be the last. Every Thanksgiving is the last in its own way, just as every one is new. For this year’s feast and for every feast I have the privilege of joining in the future, I will be thankful, regardless of the inevitable changes life will bring. And when I’m gone, I want those I love to be happy that it happened, not sad that it won’t happen again.

Move forward. Be thankful. Let’s eat.

Thanksgiving Unstructured Commentary 2017

I was perusing my Thanksgiving posts from the last several years and adding them to a new category called “Thanksgiving” so they’d be more easily searchable for me. Unfortunately, adding the new category and updating added them all to my Twitter feed. My apologies to the four people who follow that feed. Though, likely, it’s not the same four people who follow this. So they’ll never know I apologized. Oh well, enough about them. This is about us.

In last year’s post, I mentioned that the annual harvest had been “a bag of dicks”. That was ugly! I’d say I’m feeling more positive this year. 12 month’s ago, I, like many normal humans, was concerned about what the future would be like with our new insane president. Fortunately, it turns out, life is exactly the same. Well, the news is different, but the actual day-to-day part of life seems unchanged. That’s good enough, right? Let’s celebrate with a feast!

Thanksgiving feast is the only feast officially recognized by this blog. I eat until I’m sick 176 times per year, but this is the big one. This one is planned. It’s also the one time a year that I’m voluntarily social. I would be fine with a hundred people in our home for that one day only, provided most of them leave pretty quickly after eating. I wouldn’t go to someone else’s home to be with those people. Let’s not be crazy. But I’ll share our food with them in the comfort of my own home… because I know all the places I can hide if I get uncomfortable.

This year we have the added benefit of our college bound son coming home for the whole week. This is the beginning of the next stage in life. The one that eventually develops into adding a daughter in law and then grandchildren into the mix. We’ve already had “the talk”. The one about making sure any woman he dates doesn’t have conflicting Thanksgiving traditions. That’s a deal breaker for us, and we would destroy her.

So there you go. The year has been better than bag of dicks, we’re all getting older and while it’s not completely impossible, it’s probably unlikely that we’ll all die in a nuclear holocaust any time soon. Let’s eat!

Thanksgiving in 2016

Generations from now, when historians look back on 2016, they’ll agree that it can eat a bag of dicks. This year’s harvest was a steaming pile of crap. Regardless, we’ll give thanks tomorrow and celebrate with a feast.

As a nation, we normally gather on Thanksgiving in large diverse groups of friends and family. We smile and nod at racist uncles and Fox News repeaters, indulge vegan cousins and ignore goth nieces. A large enough dose of tryptophan makes everything a little more tolerable. This year, however, many will gather in smaller like minded groups. Some won’t join any gathering at all. The weeks’ old wounds of election day are still too raw for tolerance to be allowed back in our homes.

I often wonder about Thanksgiving in 1963. President Kennedy was killed on the Friday before Thanksgiving. He’d already pardoned a turkey. Right before Thanksgiving is a shit time to die. What’s worse is he was on his way to lunch. I’m very structured about meal times. I would have been thinking about what I was having for lunch at that time of day, and at that time of November, I’d have been daydreaming of the coming feast. Maybe presidents have more to worry about, but maybe they don’t. Maybe the personal tragedy of November 22, 1963 is that a man was robbed of life, lunch and Thanksgiving feast. I’ve heard stories of some pretty horrible things said in the immediate aftermath of the Kennedy assassination. That must have been an uncomfortable year to share a table with people who had wicked words in their mouths.

There’s no moral to this stream of consciousness. If I’ve learned anything this year, it’s that you don’t need to make a point. Also a bag of dicks is a lot uglier than anyone could have dreamed.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Thirty Days of Thanks… You’re Welcome.

Day 1: I am thankful for fat Asians. I hope to live to see fat Indians and fat Africans.

Day 2: I am thankful for candy corn. Until I eat a second piece of candy corn.

Day 3: I am thankful for that old man I saw at the Post Office who was wearing ladies spike heel dress shoes. Let your freak flag fly old man!

Day 4: I am thankful that Sasquatches are so good at hiding.

Day 5: I am thankful for that commercial where the guy just keeps saying “enchiladas” over and over.

Day 6: I am thankful for rhymes to help me remember which kind of snakes are venomous.

Day 7: I am thankful that XM Radio won’t start playing Christmas music until Nov. 17. So you can all just calm the hell down.

Day 8: I am thankful that I went bald from the top down and not the bottom up.

Day 9: I am thankful that someone put the 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special on YouTube. For years I thought I’d dreamed that.

“I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now / From up and down, and still somehow / It’s cloud illusions I recall / I really don’t know clouds at all” – Joni Mitchell

Day 10: I am thankful for a cloudless day. Why are ALL clouds shaped like penises?

Day 11: I am thankful that Siri converts all of my spoken requests into something that would require a Navajo Code Talker to translate.

Day 12: I am thankful for one hour every two years for those signs that say “watch for ice on bridges” all year round.

Day 13: I am thankful that we don’t live on the timeline where the first President to control the atomic bomb was a vicious man-beast called Hairy Ass Truman.

Day 14: I am thankful for children, without whom all of my cool electronics would be made by giant ham-fisted adults.

Day 15: Hodor Hodor Hodor Hodor Hodor!

Day 16: I am thankful for TV shows that suck after the first season for allowing me to take my free time back. I’m looking at you True Blood.

Day 17: I am thankful for The Neil Diamond Christmas Album. Not just because I love Neil Diamond, but because a Jewish guy singing “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” is a special kind of selling out that should be celebrated.

Day 18: I am thankful that in a cave somewhere, there are two Templars who still know how to get, how to get to Sesame Street.

Day 19: I am thankful that they started playing Christmas music on the radio last weekend. Happy ThanksChristmas everyone!

Day 20: I am thankful for thongs most days, but the one I’m wearing today is riding up.

Day 21: I am thankful that Rick Perry is ready to leave Austin and start his new career as the front man for the Journey Christian cover band Don’t Stop Believin’.

Day 22: I am thankful that all the times in my life when there was only one set of footprints in the sand happened a few hours after I’d eaten a bunch of refried beans.

There is a man a legend tells/ who stands for what is right/ Like Wyatt Earp he never shirks/ or cowards from a fight. — Lobo means wolf.

Day 23: I am thankful for 23 of the 38 episodes of Sheriff Lobo.

Day 24: I am thankful for the ever present and unexplained connection between rednecks and wolf iconography.

Day 25: I am thankful that I never saw my Mommy kissing Santa Claus. That’s just really, really wrong.

Day 26: I am thankful that alcohol helps me understand for a few hours how regular people think all the time.

Day 27: I am thankful that “No Shave November” has made Thanksgiving as ugly as it is tasty.

Day 28: I am thankful for pumpkin pie for distracting everyone while I eat the pies that don’t suck.

Day 29: I am thankful that Santa Claus has proven that obesity is in no way linked to mortality.

Day 30: I’m thankful November isn’t 31 days long. Maybe next year we can do this in February!

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, my High Holy Day. Lisa’s family will come over and we’ll once again blend our traditions, each person carrying a ghost from their own childhood in the form of a platter of food. It may be the stuffing their grandma made or the pie their favorite aunt used to make. Some new traditions may start tomorrow, and some old ones may vanish forever. This is only the most recent incarnation of my favorite holiday.

I’m not someone who likes to spend a lot of time dwelling on the past. I am very good at compartmentalising my life, and that includes keeping the past in the past, where it belongs. But at this time of year, it seems like the veil separating the past from the present is so thin I may fall through. I feel like I could be driving home from work, sitting alone in my car, and suddenly find myself sitting down for Thanksgiving dinner at my Mema’s house thirty years ago. It may be seventy degrees out, but I can feel the chill of the last Thanksgiving before my mom passed away. It was 1993, and it snowed and iced on Thanksgiving. I almost skipped it because I was scared to drive on the ice. Only a handful of people were able to make it that year. I’m glad I was one of them.

I’ve shared the Thanksgiving feast with representatives of every generation of my family who lived in my life span, from my great grandparents, who were born in the 1890’s, to my son, who was born over a century later. Some day I’ll eat the feast with my grandchildren, and maybe someday with my great grandchildren. Those future feasts will be as different from tomorrow’s as tomorrow’s will be from the ones in my memory. But each will carry with it the joyful memories of all that came before.

Tomorrow, the memory of my parents, grandparents and great grandparents will share a table with us, as though they were still here. And hopefully, years after I have moved through the veil, the memory of me will live on to share Thanksgiving with the generations I will never meet.

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