alive and grateful
For many years, Daddy carved the turkey with the electric knife that my sister and I had put on layaway at the J. C. Penney in downtown Clarksdale, Mississippi, to be our Christmas present to our parents. We had pooled our allowance for weeks and then used a few of the dollars from our Christmas Club accounts at the bank, the ones that gave us each a whole ten dollars to spend after a year of saving. What my sister and I thought was the grooviest device ever was a frivolous gimmick to Daddy. “We can use it on Thanksgiving, Harold,” my mother may have said, trying to smooth over the wince in my father’s eye roll. He stored the contraption in a distant cabinet reserved for things like dessert plates and gravy boats, the things of special occasions that were few and far-between.
I remember Daddy rising early on fourth Thursdays in November to saute the onions and celery, a scent that blended with fatherly duty, simmering in my memory as the fragrance of home. In my twenties, life broke us a thousand miles apart and the time came when we didn’t have Thanksgivings together anymore. Complications arrived in the feisty shapes and sizes of divorces and new relationships, the cost of travel, and preferential matters that blew up the bridges between us. Or was it the distance between who we had been and who we had become that cratered our drive to commune?
Today is the first time since Daddy’s been gone that his death date will fall on Thanksgiving Day. I had known it would happen eventually, but so soon? I’ll never forget the tepid turkey meal I consumed alone in the hospital cafeteria the day before we all agreed to free Daddy from the ventilator.
Carving away, carving away, carving away. That is what the holidays have asked of me. I have carved away the anticipation of company, my children disinclined to visit in light of the option for video calls as the new holiday preset. And I admit, I have succumbed to the state of separation and let myself curl away from the demands of being together in three-dimensions.
My line dangles from a fallen branch of the family tree, the wild, restless ones who have opted for the here and now and who don’t thrive on family pride, the family name, the rabid self-identification with those who came before us, who fed and clothed us, who watched us for signs of obedience and affection, for a meeting of expectations that came along with being a white-middle-class-American family with a two-car garage and a family bible.
I’ve carved away so much of what it means to “have” Thanksgiving. The pilgrim hats and feather headbands of elementary school. The football games. Wheat rolls. Giblet gravy. I no longer feel the relief of a hard-won day off. I’ve purged my holiday decorations down to one box that lives in the garage most of the year. I decry Black Friday. I’m taking a holiday from the shoulds this year, from everything but the turkey and dressing and cranberry sauce. Where’s that electric knife when I need it? Carve away, that’s my motto this Thanksgiving Day.
This year, being alive and grateful is enough.
Having experienced Ann Randolph’s’ fabulous Unmute Yourself writing class for the month of November, I’m feeling the strength and power that comes from being in a virtual writing community and the reinforcement of a talented, joyful, expert writer and performer who provides a place for ritual, mindfulness, and creation as she embodies her mantra that “Your story matters!”
