Being Thankful for Thanksgiving

Even if it sucks, celebrate around the suckage

Don’t worry, this isn’t a real column. Just a brief pop-in, at least by my verbose standards. I like to save most of my writing on Thanksgiving Day for my Gratitude Journal, which I illustrate with lots of lovey-heart stickers and Taylor + Travis inscriptions. So if you’re a paid subscriber, this won’t count against you getting your money’s worth. And if you’re a free subscriber, you’re already way over your allotment anyway, so there’s no point in whining about it. But the last thing either of you need on this hallowed Day of Thanks is some peevish gasbag inflicting his political opinions on you. There’ll be plenty of time for that later, when you see your family at Thanksgiving dinner. I’d rather keep the day clean, so that we don’t lose sight of what it’s historically been about: loved ones, and thankfulness, and gluttony, and the tryptophan-activated couch snooze we fall into while watching men in helmets and tights inflict traumatic brain injuries on each other, and celebrating that we’re all still here enjoying  our God-given bounty after swiping our land from the Indians so that we could rid ourselves of perfectly harmless buffalo and pave nature over to put up an endless array of vape shops and Dollar stores — just like Chief Sitting Bull would’ve done if he’d had a little more get-up-and-go and some good old-fashioned American ingenuity.

Sorry, high holy days like Thanksgiving bring out the heretic in me sometimes, as you might have noticed in the past.  But the truth is, I love Thanksgiving. It’s like Christmas without all the gift-buying pressure or seasonal letdown after it’s over. It makes me warm and reflective without making me maudlin, as Christmas-thru-New Year’s tends to do, when I get all end-of-the-year sentimental. And I am indeed grateful for so many things: my life and my wife and my dog and my kids and the fish I catch and get to hold and the fish that elude me (we all need something to aspire to) and the bluebirds who come to my yard who I (sadly) don’t get to hold. And I’m also legitimately grateful for you, dear readers, who share enough of my enthusiasms, even if not all of them, to make it possible for me to not have to get a real job. Which I think we can all agree would be an ugly fiasco, as I am not HR-compliant or well-suited for managerial oversight.

So I thought on this lovely day of Thanksgiving – even the name of which sounds like a song – I would attempt to enhance yours with one poem (poems are just songs without musical accompaniment, though the best ones help you hear the music), as well as two actual songs.

Here’s a thing of beauty from Linda McCarriston, from her 1984 book, Talking Soft Dutch, appropriately titled, “Thanksgiving.”

Every year we call it down upon ourselves,
the chaos of the day before the occasion,
the morning before the meal. Outdoors,
the men cut wood, fueling appetite
in the gray air, as Nana, Arlene, Mary,
Robin—whatever women we amount to—
turn loose from their wrappers the raw,
unmade ingredients. A flour sack leaks,
potatoes wobble down counter tops
tracking dirt like kids, blue hubbard erupts
into shards and sticky pulp when it’s whacked
with the big knife, cranberries leap away
rather than be halved. And the bird, poor
blue thing—only we see it in its dead skin—
gives up for good the long, obscene neck, the gizzard,
the liver quivering in my hand, the heart.

So what? What of it? Besides the laughter,
I mean, or the steam that shades the windows
so that the youngest sons must come inside
to see how the smells look. Besides
the piled wood closing over the porch windows,
the pipes the men fill, the beers
they crack, waiting in front of the game.

Any deliberate leap into chaos, small or large,
with an intent to make order, matters. That’s what.
A whole day has passed between the first apple
cored for pie, and the last glass polished
and set down. This is a feast we know how to make,
a Day of Feast, a day of thanksgiving
for all we have and all we are and whatever
we’ve learned to do with it: Dear God, we thank you
for your gifts in this kitchen, the fire,
the food, the wine. That we are together here.
Bless the world that swirls outside these windows—
a room full of gifts seeming raw and disordered,
a great room in which the stoves are cold,
the food scattered, the children locked forever
outside dark windows. Dear God, grant
to the makers and keepers power to save it all.

And speaking of the keepers of it all, here’s a song that makes me think of my mom, whom I’m still blessed to have around. And not just because I write about her frequently and need the material, or because she’s still cooking Thanksgiving dinner, even though she’s getting up there, age-wise, which makes me nervous. In fairness to her, I guess the rest of us keep ascending the age ladder as well. I know I’ve only headed in one direction since the day she birthed me. And by the time she was the age I am now, both of her parents had already been gone for about 20 years. But this is one of my favorites from Lyle Lovett, “Family Reserve,” off his utterly brilliant Joshua, Judges, Ruth album. It’s about not fretting over losing your family while you still have them, even if a few cast members have already left the stage:

And we're all gonna be here forever
So mama, don't you make such a stir
Just put down that camera
And come on and join up
The last of the family reserve

And if you’ve experienced real loss — as so many have, and as we eventually all will, the holidays often just intensifying the void — here’s a song for you, too. One that doesn’t insult the absence in your life by leaving it unnoticed, but which likewise refuses to relinquish its hope or its taking stock in what remains. If nothing else, the Memphis Horns-style booster won’t let us swing too low. This is the Kinks’ Ray Davies doing “Thanksgiving Day” off his 2006 solo album, Other People’s Lives. Here’s the lyrics, if you’re so inclined.

So have a happy Thanksgiving, or happy enough, on Slack Tide.