Happy Thanksgiving!
Happy Thanksgiving! Or, if you have a whole ideology about the holiday, Happy Day Off Day!
I was topic-grinding on my walk this morning when I remembered what tomorrow is. It’s kind of a bittersweet holiday this year. I’m hesitant to write about it because, for example, my list of things I’m grateful for STARTS with, “I’m grateful that I’m no longer enslaved by the need for my wife’s approval,” and pretty much goes downhill from there. It makes for an awkward toast.
And then there’s the relative (pun intended) carnage of modernity on our families. Mobility, career-chasing, divorce, and different extra-tribal alliances have pretty much eliminated our ability to have one of those traditional Thanksgiving get-togethers where the men gather in one room to sit in silence, and the women gather in the kitchen to flay each other alive.
Oh, how I miss those lost halcyon days of yesteryear…
Get this: even after 16 years of marriage, my family and my wife’s family have never even met, and almost certainly never will. The more time that passes, the more scandalous and absurd that fact seems to me. In the beginning it sort of made sense - my family lives on the west coast, hers on the east. Mine is/was at least nominally Catholic, hers is some kind of non-denominational group. (They’re Judgmentalists, I think. An offshoot of the Condemnions of Kortrijk.) They didn’t come to the wedding, and let’s just say the relationship between my wife and my family is warm. Warm like Chernobyl circa April 27th, 1986.
And now we live equally distant between both clans here in the center of the country. Kids, this is why Daddy threw those words at the Pandora station holiday commercial.
Okay, let’s try again. How does this go? We look back on the year and list things we’re grateful for, right? Fine.
I’m grateful for the provision from above because it simply has to be from above. We’re a wreck, and every single time it looks like our turkey is cooked (topical!), some 11th-hour deus ex machina alights into our drama to save the day. It was the side video editing gig that turned into a family-supporting job for awhile, and then for several months after it was supposed to end, it kept going. It was the bank job that appeared just as I was concocting desperate schemes to revive an Ikea delivery service idea I’ve had for ages. The bank job is nothing but opportunity, even though I’m going to gripe about certain properties of the job from time to time.
I’m grateful for the apparently “random” circumstances that forced me, as in grabbed-me-by-the-neck and shoved me, to this chair in front of this keyboard and made me start writing. I could have gone another two decades before the pain of not writing became too intense to ignore.
I’m grateful for our little Orthodox community on the prairie. “Eastern Okladoxy,” as some call it. It’s daily discovery of weirdness and grace, in whose light my flaws are revealed and healed.
And, of course, I’m grateful for four beautiful children, J, K, C, and A, who are becoming, like, whole other people right before our eyes. It’s been a privilege to get to know these little creations of ours. Sure, babies are cute and fun and all (when you get enough sleep, that is), but the real joy is meeting them anew every day.
I’m grateful for my wife, too, believe it or not. I don’t have to reach down too deep to find the genuine sentiment here. I married her in part because she was a fierce woman of conviction, and despite whatever disagreements we may presently have, she’s fighting for the same transcendent good, true, and beautiful that I (think) I am. It helps that she’s smokin’ hot and just seems to become more beautiful with age. If she could just turn her artillery a couple of degrees to the left, that’d be great.
I don’t always feeel it, but most of the time I’m grateful for the struggle, because I’ve seen what a life of ease can do to a person. I believe without a shadow of a doubt that if I’d inherited wealth, or if I’d been successful early in life, I’d be a corpulent, syphilitic blob by now. So yes, I’m genuinely, enthusiastically grateful for these trials of life. Could use a break, though…
Life is good. Happy Thanksgiving from Oklahoma, y’all.