Thanksgiving

The birds were thankful today, crowding around the ones in the front and back of the house. Among the doves on the ground were some juncos, which we rarely see here. The day was clear and crisp, and I was glad I had filled the bird bath, because several of the little ones took baths, including a female goldfinch. Odd for this time of year.

While filling the feeders in the hummingbird & butterfly garden, I noticed a tuft of Bonnie’s hair caught in the grass between two of the fence staves. Stave The First. Thanksgiving day means its time to pull down a beloved volume of Dickens and step into that warm, redolent world.

I brought the Christmas tree up from the cellar and took it out of the box, spreading it on a table in the sun so that any spiders or other hostiles might flee. The last thing I want is to jam my arm into the ersatz limbs while hanging ornaments and disturb a Bravo Romeo. For many years we’ve bought a nice Fraser fir from a fellow who travels up from North Carolina with his family and sets up business in an empty lot. But the prices have been steadily increasing over the years, and now even a very small live tree is about 35-40 bucks. So last year after Christmas, we saw a local store offering prelit artificial trees on deep discount and purchased one. It rested in the cellar, among the casks of Amontillado and decomposing possum corpses, until today.

Speaking of possums, I saw one on the ground beneath a bird feeder outside the front door the other night. Remembering the odorus horribulus of a few months ago, I grabbed my shotgun, ran outside, and blew her to bits right there on the lawn.

I lie, of course. I just whispered a greeting to her, asked her not to find her way down into my cellar and especially into my furnace, and slid the door closed, leaving her to her nocturnal snacking.

When I was a child, we spent almost every Thanksgiving with my grandmother and my aunt. I remember sprawling on my stomach with my sister in front of my aunt’s large console tv one year and watching a cartoon called “The Mouse on the Mayflower.” I remember nothing about the program except that I enjoyed it. How could I not have? Being able to sprawl for a half hour or an hour on my belly with my chin in my hands would suffice to put any boy in an enjoying mood.

My wife and I were talking today about how we both always found our respective houses too hot on holidays. Close and hot and too small, with relatives crowded in there, especially relatives about whom one was completely indifferent. Our talk made me think of Dylan Thomas’s book “A Child’s Christmas In Wales,” and how he described the same thing: a scorching, stuffy, crowded house on a holiday, and the screaming need to escape and run outside into the cold, cleansing air.

This is the first Thanksgiving in a decade that Bonnie won’t be here to mooch tidbits of food, especially when I pull out the carving knife and fork. I’m not roasting a turkey this year, for the first time. Instead, I’m trying my hand at Cornish game hens.

Churches and parachurch organizations will be feeding the hungry and needy today, and I’m glad they will. I do wonder where they are the rest of the year, though. Where are they when the old man who smells like onions is lonely? Where are they for the young man whose slut wife was awarded the children because, well, she’s the mother, and he sits in a chain restaurant and eats mechanically,  with his head down? Go look for him right now, church people. You’ll find him. He and the old man and the other lonely souls are always among us. They’ll be here tomorrow, too.

People will go around the table at dinnertime this day and speak of what they’re thankful for. Me? I’m thankful for tow-head grandsons who speak with Texas drawls, wear boots, and already love fishing and getting dirty. I’m grateful for the loving wife who reads my mind and makes me Jello salad every year. I’m thankful that I still get pissed off at foolish behavior, and that I’m wise enough to understand that the good feeling my anger gives me is just that — a good thing.

Dixee, our remaining dog, is doing all right, though she clearly misses Bonnie. I worry about her, though. The red sweater my wife dresses her in, with tulle and almond-sized fake jewels, makes her look like a canine drag queen. I have begun calling her Zsa Zsa when we’re alone.

I remember the last Thanksgiving I spent with my mother, 20 years ago today. At the time I was in the throes of rabid Presbyterianism, and when asked to offer the mealtime prayer, I launched into some marathon monologue about sin and God’s wrath and our worthlessness, and I managed to piss off my brother-in-law, who at that time bore a pretty fair resemblance to country singer Jamey Johnson. Later, I escaped the too-crowded, too-hot house and went outside to smoke a cigar, which was every bit as much an affectation as my Puritan prayer stylings. My sister told me later that she and my mother stood at the kitchen sink and watched me through the window. “He looks just like yore daddy,” Mother told my sister. “Look how he stands.” The bloodline always tells.

I’m thankful I no longer pray like I did that day.

And I remember the time Mother criticized my wife’s homemade dressing with that thin little killing smile of hers — “Too much sage!” — which hurt my wife’s feelings, but she bore it with her usual flawless grace. Some months later, Mother came up to my wife and offered her a simple but deeply sincere apology for what she’d said. And I stood there with my mouth open, watching Mother ask forgiveness for only the second time I ever heard her do so in my lifetime.  I’m thankful for the memory, and for both of those beautiful women.

The sun is on my face as I write this longhand in the back yard, the air crisp, the temperature dropping as I think of the young man who promised to deliver me a load of firewood. Cutting my own wood is one of those things I can no longer do. The list grows. But I’m thankful for the warmth the wood stove provides. And the night and the cold will come on like Hemingway’s description of how people go broke: gradually at first, then all of a sudden.

We’ll feast in a while and then drowse in our chairs, and the possums will scavenge outside, and the cows will stand in the fields with a cape of frost on their backs, and the stars overhead will give sailors the ancient maps to the channels, and that’s worth being thankful for.

I made an glancing allusion to Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” at the beginning of this post, and I am thinking now of my favorite scene in that old book, the scene where the Ghost of Christmas Present escorts Scrooge to observe two humble lighthouse keepers.

The Spirit did not tarry here, but bade Scrooge hold his
robe, and passing on above the moor, sped–whither? Not
to sea? To sea. To Scrooge’s horror, looking back, he saw
the last of the land, a frightful range of rocks, behind them;
and his ears were deafened by the thundering of water, as it
rolled and roared, and raged among the dreadful caverns it
had worn, and fiercely tried to undermine the earth.

Built upon a dismal reef of sunken rocks, some league
or so from shore, on which the waters chafed and dashed,
the wild year through, there stood a solitary lighthouse.
Great heaps of sea-weed clung to its base, and storm-birds
–born of the wind one might suppose, as sea-weed of the
water–rose and fell about it, like the waves they skimmed.

But even here, two men who watched the light had made
a fire, that through the loophole in the thick stone wall shed
out a ray of brightness on the awful sea. Joining their
horny hands over the rough table at which they sat, they
wished each other Merry Christmas in their can of grog; and
one of them: the elder, too, with his face all damaged and
scarred with hard weather, as the figure-head of an old ship
might be: struck up a sturdy song that was like a Gale in
itself.

Again the Ghost sped on, above the black and heaving sea…

I cannot say why this scene is so compelling in my mind. I can only say that I always think of it first when someone mentions “A Christmas Carol.” I have never seen the scene portrayed in any film or stage version of the book. Perhaps that is for the best; the scene stays special within my heart and I am thankful for its presence. It is Christmas and Thanksgiving and my birthday, all baked together in a tidy, sentimental pie, smelling of pumpkin and nutmeg, and now it’s time to pester my wife for a space for my birds in the oven….

…and so Happy Thanksgiving.

~ S.K. Orr