Thanks-A-Lot-Day

This is certainly the most benign of holidays and the one I most look forward to. We gather; we feel gratitude, eating and drinking with abandon, as we celebrate the accident of geography that landed us here instead of there, though, at times, elsewhere seems like my true address. There is a sense of grace contained in that word, gratitude and maybe in ourselves. The table is a communal moment, well-observed around the hearth even if there is no hearth. What a concept.

We offer a place at the table to that man who can't stop talking and the other guy whom we'd never let our sister marry. Everyone is to be tolerated for a few hours, numbed as we are after a feast of gluttony followed by hours of sloth. This is one of those moments when we practice William Blake's notion that the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. But my guess is that we feel more crapulous than sagacious. 

The hymn we used to sing in school ended with the veiled warning that God forgets not his own. I suppose all the rest not in that tent were to be forgotten. He forgot me and I forgot him. Fair enough. This year it's also fair to wonder what the Almighty was thinking when he bestowed the magma of MAGA upon us or as Oliver Hardy said to Stan Laurel, A fine mess you've gotten us into this time. If He wants to hasten and chasten let him hasten their reign and chasten their misdeeds.  

The idea of asking the Lord's blessing suggests some element of forgiveness. Forgive us our transgression for being uninvited guests to this continent, stealing the land from our indigenous hosts and almost wiping them out.

My mother, in her infinite wisdom, decreed that Thanksgiving was a gentile holiday somehow akin to Christmas. Therefore, it was devoutly unobserved. Maybe she never learned how to cook a turkey or Murray, the chicken-plucker,

didn't know about gobblers. 

My first Thanksgiving was at age 21. I remember driving to Burbank in dense fog so thick I mistakenly mistook the shrubbery on the freeway for the off-ramp. I was a pilgrim making my way to this new world landing on a rock with my Plymouth. 

I must have had a yearning to be part of Americana as depicted by Norman Rockwell. So it was, I untangled my car from the landscape and found my way to a chair at that all-American table of new friends. I had arrived for my place in the tableau of this model family. Within a few months the host couple divorced, and the father of my friend shot himself. So much for normalcy.

Thanksgiving goes on even though an estimated 45 million turkeys will be slaughtered. I'm reminded of the school play in 7th grade when I was cast as John Alden. I wonder if anybody got to play the turkey.