On the drive across town on Thanksgiving Day, the streets of Washington,DC, where I live, were near empty. Some
people would say the city was dead. But it wasn’t dead. Not alive either. A
pendulum pulling down, silent, ready to be set going again, everything in
suspension. So. Still.
But amidst this half-emptied city, there was
activity. Visitors rolled suitcases down the sidewalks to get to their hotels
or friends’ or families’ houses; dogs begged at the doors of their houses and
got taken out, tongues wagging in thankfulness, into the small urban parks here
and met other dogs. Owners exchanged pleasantries and wished each other happy
holiday, gone strangers again only in the parting.
Then there were the few shops, businesses doing business. Pink
neon “Open” signs. Wide glass windows lit up from within that seemed like a
flashlights amidst buildings gone dark in their closure.
And all those workers. Just in my short trek, I saw
policemen, gas station attendants, taxi drivers, security guards, doormen, and
bus drivers on duty. I passed by hotels and the hospital filled with people
working their way through this holiday--tallied up the registration clerks and
the cleaners and the doctors and nurses and orderlies alike. If it was a
holiday for any of them, it was a delayed one, set out of joint by employment
and its obligations.
Several years ago I visited a local Pentecostal church as
part of research for a story. During the prayer and thankfulness section of the
service, a teenager thanked God for answering his prayer after so many months
and finally giving him Sundays off, so that he could come and worship. It
doesn’t matter what you yourself believe about religion to come to understand
the weight of a boy’s belief that it will take divine intervention to allow him
to have a say in his own work schedule. I thought about him just as he
described himself--down on his knees time and again, praying hard. I
thought about the part of the story he didn’t tell as much. All those weeks the
schedule went up with a thumbtack on the corkboard, a white sheet marked up
with a chart of the days and hours and his name, penned in, again on Sunday.
All those times the answer came back to him: No.
Most people working the holiday in this city didn’t choose
to do so. They’re the newest or youngest or most elderly or lowest
ranking--whatever it was that allotted them the least choice in the lottery of
working days. Whatever bad luck had become ordinary life.
A friend from Canada takes pains, when she
discusses this holiday, to announce it as American Thanksgiving. She explained
to me that Canada celebrates its own holiday on the second Monday of October, as a harvest
celebration.
I write this to check myself from getting too much on my
high horse, too fast into my American bravado-as-pity snit about what the day
should mean. After all, Washington is an international city, so for many workers, that Thursday was just that--just
another weekday workday rather than any special day of celebration.
It’s not just different national Thanksgivings across
different days, then, but wildly different experiences of holiday on the same
day--from sidewalk to gas station to rooftop to basement to the wide open air
of that chill day, that I need to reconcile. The workers, the disgruntled, the
yearning, the unthankful. God bless the latter. I fear there is so
little room for this that the whole idea of thanksgiving becomes one more indignity for those at
its mercy.
Some of the blogs in the arena of infertility, loss, and
parenting (in all its forms) I love most honor the necessary act of gratitude.
They capture green cuttings--the meet of the blade with the flesh of the stalk
that marks a replanting--those surprise offshoots of our days that, if not
recorded and celebrated and tended, through the thanking, are lost and go dry.
But I’m not writing here, sweet ones, about such sweetness and light.
I’m writing about mandatory gratitude when you least feel it. The forcing of
meaning--of family, togetherness, fruitfulness and bounty--that can make this not a happy,
but a hard day for many. Here is the risk of American Thanksgiving.
Not just across the city, but across the country, these are
times of great difficulty. A terrible economy, high jobless rates, fledgling
businesses hanging on, barely. People are still recovering from storms that set
houses to timber, fires that set houses to ash, finding shelter where they can
in the most makeshift of ways. One day before Thanksgiving Day as we celebrate
it here, violence in Mumbai took people under, shook the bones of survivors in India and, around the world as well as in the United States,
of those who survive those killed in the attacks.
Over the past 10 days, my brother has spent his days digging
out the ground to try to repair a water main he busted on his property when he
decided to fix the fence in his backyard. He’s busied himself with household projects,
as he is unemployed and has been for several months, with no good leads in
hand. His yard erupted in a geyser; the estimates came in at impossible numbers.
Five thousand dollars might as well be five million. He decided he’s got to fix
it himself. His bills mount. He can’t catch a break.
Isn’t that how it is? Bad luck feeds on bad luck. The writer
Raymond Carver used to use the phrase all the time--in his fiction and
reportedly in his life as well--about people who “can’t win for losing.”
I’ve certainly felt that, and I felt it especially at times
that were mandated as celebratory. “I’m getting married.” “I’m pregnant.” “I’m
pregnant again.” “I got the job.” Don’t all these pronouncements amount to “I’m
lucky. Just lucky. Girlfriend, am I lucky. SO lucky. Lucky, lucky,
lucky.”
Which, if you’re lucky, too, means a shared celebration. But honey,
if you’re not…. Well, then those are hard-as-hell things to hear. And the
strident, biding, biting hope that one day your luck might change? It doesn’t
go away, even if your luck does change for the better. Just hearing
someone else’s good news, when it hits right on whatever your own war wound is: it just seems to
slide in like an injection of ice into the body--one prick from the outside,
then your whole soul gone cold.
November at its hardest: empty, not full; lonely, not
complete; desolate, so far from fertile, impossible to imagine what the word
could mean. November and then December thereafter. The hard ground that keeps
refreezing just as you’re trying to dig your way into repair.
Trust that I am so thankful for what I have. Trust that I
know it. Trust that my deepest thankfulness means I will not proclaim it here
but keep it private, lest it seem like admonition against those who have
something else they felt on that day.
On Thanksgiving Day, before any festivities, I heard noise
only because it was a disruption of such quiet. The city bus barreling down the
street outside, and then nothing but the sound of the keyboard as the letters
got pressed out into words, the scratch of chair against hardwood floor, the
swallow down of water and the slight ting the glass made against the desk in
the setting down.
In the hours before I travelled to where I'd celebrate that day, I conjured another gathered table. Here, at this other table's center, is a cornucopia of want and need. Its surrounding leaves, true to fall
's succumbing into winter, are the
last, last hint of fire orange, taken over by burnt brown. The table is full.
It’s a feast. No need to starve. There’s bounty enough for all. But I
promise--no one here has to say what she’s thankful for. No one here has to
pretend. The meal might be heavy; still, it’s made by loving hand. We know
around this table there is need for sustenance no common ritual, no expected
rite, will provide. This is no American Thanksgiving in its falsified heart. It’s a
holiday stolen back from its bad beginnings and history. It asks you only to
come as you are and, if you meet the task, demands not your thanks, but offers
you the kind thanks, deep thanks you may need to sustain yourself throughout the hard season to follow.
(Images from Norman Rockwell, Official Website, CMG Worldwide)
