Verse 322
I have a tendency to write with the seasons, but I’m no slave to topical content. Regardless, welcome to my Thanksgiving Verse.
“Of all the Charlie Browns in the world, you’re the Charlie Browniest,” it was said to Chuck at the beginning of the famous Peanuts Christmas special. I’m one of the lesser Charlie Browns that he was compared to. I know this about myself. If there’s a means of overcomplicating something simple into a conundrum, I’ll find it. I won’t diagnose this tendency with pseudo-psychobabble, but I hesitate to dismiss this aspect of my character as fast as the Peanuts gang trolled Charlie Brown when he balked at Christmas. The conflict of almost every great holiday film juxtaposes the purity of the holiday against the realities of our individual circumstances. Those films resonate because they’re true to our collective experience.
On its face, Thanksgiving is a hard day to screw up. Here’s the deal: day off, feast, and lighthearted traditions of your family’s creation. You can even take a nap! It’s a solid set-up. Despite this, I’ve had exactly two great Thanksgivings out of forty-five. That’s 4.4%. Now before I cast an illusion of having a Charlie Brown-like dejection over Thanksgiving, let me correct that misimpression. I’ve only had two great ones — but I’ve had 43 good ones. As different as the two great ones were from each other, as well as the other 43, I recently identified the theme that differentiates the many good from the elite great.
Part of becoming an adult is eventually (maybe) questioning your childhood trajectory towards Grown-Up Land. This took me a long time — almost as though it was outside my scope of vision to understand that Thanksgiving could be anything different than what I’d known it to be: four boring Connerys with unvarying roles. Mother: stress-cooking. Father: day-drinking. Brother: jailbreak-planning to join someone else’s family. Me: watching Barry Sanders. No one took the lead on being particularly thankful and the uncomfortable pause just before the meal denoting whether anyone would say grace was, perhaps, the most awkward moment of my year.
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It seems like the wrong people are often in charge of Thanksgiving. Meaning no disrespect to my childhood family, avoiding my parents is my first step in celebrating what I’m thankful for. How can I possibly be meditative on thankfulness with my mother hollering at the stuffing? I can’t find Thanksgiving’s core in their company. Those weren’t unhappy Thanksgivings, but they missed the point. Maybe it’s enough to gather with family and enjoy a free day with a good meal. Maybe that’s the simple act of thanksgiving that I substitute with introspection. If so, the genesis of my behavior came from one of my two great Thanksgivings.
I was twenty-four and Thanksgiving had tumbled from a predictable childhood routine of holiday to the ragged version of travelling home for the holidays. An unusual series of events in late November of 2000 left me without a place to go. My parents had relocated to the greater Tampa area after a couple decades in Massachusetts — a move openly emulated by Tom Brady some twenty years later. While I might normally have joined them in Florida, they decided to vacation that Thanksgiving with my older brother and his soon-to-be wife in Las Vegas. I was essentially single, eliminating any other conventional turkey-related resource on a late-November Thursday. I travelled to Captiva Island on the Gulf Coast. I spent three days alone there — and it’s important to denote that no cell phone hibernated in my pocket and no interweb interjected itself between myself, an empty cabin, and the pelican-laden November sands of Florida. Such was life in 2000.
My third and final day on Captiva was Thanksgiving, before flying to Nevada that Friday. Most places were closed. I walked for miles that afternoon. The day was mild — not the Florida heat I coveted. I meandered aimlessly around the small island, interacting with nobody. I had no car. It may be the most I’d ever walked in a day. These years later, I have one distinct memory: I spent the whole walk being actively grateful for everything I could think of. For health and family, for today and yesterday, for friends and interests, for Florida and Massachusetts, for all things big and small — I was thankful. It seemed, finally, to be the day that Thanksgiving was always meant to be.
A small market was open late that afternoon. I bought a turkey sandwich, two small bags of pizza-flavored Combos, and a bottle of Gewurztraminer. I brought my feast to a pier overlooking the darkened Gulf and sat listening to an old radio show adaptation of Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train. It was the greatest Thanksgiving of my life because I finally forged my own agency to create a Thanksgiving perfectly suited to my vision of the day. The only other Thanksgiving that approached its greatness was several years later when I — still single and now living in a small studio apartment without so much as a kitchen table — cooked a Thanksgiving meal for the first time and invited twenty-six people. I was prepping turkey naked and drinking wine at six in the morning. People sat eating on the floor or shoulder to shoulder around the edges of my bed. They came when they wanted, ate when they felt like it, left as they chose to. Movies played on two televisions and two laptops spread over the tiny apartment’s footprint. My only rule was that everyone avoided stress. Bring nothing, have what you’d like, and do service to the notion of Thanks-Giving.
For all I’m thankful for, whether one person or dozens choose to read this, I’m overwhelmed with gratitude by my desire to write and an audience of friends to share it with. I don’t write professionally, but I take it as seriously as one who does. Thank you to everyone who spends time with me in this place. Happy Thanksgiving. Make the day your own.
