Thanksgiving Tradition

We set out, this year for Thanksgiving, just the two of us, Sid and me. Sid was sad that his cousins would not be joining him this year. He was glad to hang out with grandma and grandpa, especially in the kitchen.

We arrived on the holiday eve. Leaving town amid the last remnants of the day’s rush hour, mixed with other holiday travelers, leaving the city for regions closer to Lake Wobegon in geography and spirit. Watching a steady stream of tail lights I wondered if travelers are headed home, to a relative’s, and of the stories of the people inside each vehicle. I cannot keep track. I cannot ponder each set of lights. It is enough to contemplate the stories that put my son and me in our seats that late afternoon.

It’s a matter of perspective. I can look at the faint images of drivers and passengers in the early dusk as we pass. I cannot tell if they are headed someplace happy or a place of annual or daily obligation. I don’t know the nature of the commotion that ensued prior to them getting into the car, if it was wrapping up details before the long weekend, organizing small children and the things they would need to survive four days at a relative’s, fits of loathing that often accompany times with family that are aggravations of the dysfunction and ill health that plagued their developmental years, or the greatest of joys that comes with the prospect of spending time with the most favorite and precious people in the universe.

These trips matter and so do the histories that lead up to them. We all have history that makes the days what they are, the day-to-day reality that created the relationships we encounter most intensely on a holiday as well as what those days looked like in years past.

The story of our preparation was marked by excited anticipation. Sid asked if we could go up to grandma and grandpa’s a bit earlier than I suggested.

This year, Sid spent hours in the kitchen entertaining grandma and grandpa with long discussions about China, school and the finer points of learning grammar and the teachers who were as entertaining as the escapades of pedagogy. I sat in a spare bedroom, listening to quick wits and luscious stories. Mother, who was always a good speller, the kind of smarts that helped her graduate from high school at age 16, traded her knowledge with Sid about the finer points of English–alternating that with her well-remembered math anxiety that made itself known as she entered college. Dad, the great story teller, compared his college French class with Sid’s experience. Even coming from New Orleans and French heritage, we do not maintaining much French language, but dad retains the stories, especially of his professors, as a language no one teaches as well as himself.

As I sat resting, I could hear each of them laugh from at each others’ stories and their own. Teachers are the same from generation to generation and, at the same time, so different today than the days when high school graduation was little more than behaving well enough to convince the teacher to give students a C and then to march them capped and gowned into an arbitrary adulthood. They were full of conversations, most of which I have had over the past years and recent weeks with each of them, in smaller bits and pieces. Sid’s monologues were enough to wrap grandma and grandpa’s attention. He looked forward to this trip as well for the stories he learns, as well as the grandkid attention.

I knew there are more stories. I hear them. As many stories that get shared, there are long, dark afternoons endured with the aid of the second or third drink. Off in a corner with a concocted fetish of a tumbler and melted ice. So much easier to peer slightly over the lip of the glass than directly into the eyes of past shames that the relative does not want to let you forget, the in-law who still dreams of the other woman for their son and the failure after failure to conform to something that is less about virtue or morality than it is a struggle to keep family members corralled in a cage of a family secret.

History, however you define or identify it, means something. Some we carry from our childhood. Some, we carry from generations. Americans have a short history and even shorter memories. Even the short 400 years since English separatists arrived and nearly all perished in the new elements is played out with most of the details mostly forgotten and lived through a fiction of harmony that masks the genocide that makes the losses of the initial losses of the first immigrants look like the loss of one nonagenarian relative whose suffering warranted moving on into the next world.

A friend, thankful in her own rights, shared a piece written by Dennis W. Zotigh in Indian Country Today Media Network, “Do American Indians Celebrate Thanksgiving?“ The present-day follies that dress children in garb to play Pilgrim and Indian mark our history better than we remember it. Was it so necessary to insult Native identity as it is to insult our children’s intelligence? For some purposes, yes.

We are making new traditions. Some fitfully. While some school children’s are led in rituals that still mock native peoples, but more people are interested in accurate and respectful representations of history, story and the people who lived and perished in those stories. New traditions.

I have often said that Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. It is that day, for me, that has been about getting together with people who I care about. Little obligation other than to enjoy a mean and share it with great people. Okay, there’s more than that, especially if you are making a big meal. I’ve shared a few green bean bakes over the years. It is the day when mom and dad usually invite other company, student strays and need the card table to fit everyone.

In years past, we would always have snow for Thanksgiving. There would be snow on the ground, almost every year. Even if the day before had none, it was sure to snow before dinner was set on the table. Two families in St. Cloud, the Statzs and the Opatzs, would hold a touch football game between the families. It was always held in a field covered in snow. But in recent years, climate has brought us something different. I have gotten used to brown Thanksgivings. Things change.

This year, it was only Sid, me, and mom and dad. Without his cousins, Sid gets more attention from grandma and grandpa, but he said, “It’s not the same without Kamarah and Nyah here.” Mom turns from the counter and says, “What are we missing?”

My impulse was to say, “Your three other children.” I was silent.

My siblings and my nieces are having a great Thanksgiving and we are looking forward to Christmas together. Traditions.

I had mentioned to a friend that I might bring baseball gloves. She was excited to hear this, surely missing her father with whom she shared a love of baseball and the misery of the Cubs. I might be able to give mom and dad’s neighbor Thom Woodward a call: a former baseball coach, he has expressed a desire to join us, having seen Sid and I and often his cousins at the park across from his home. The gloves sat idle as the morning sun became lost behind solid clouds and the wind picked up enough toward the end of our walk. Later, it would snow. A historically accurate Thanksgiving.

[Leave comments at http://theclarencewhiteblog.wordpress.com/2012/11/23/thanksgiving-tradition/]

Mom and Hilda

In the mid 1970s, near the time I was finishing grade school, Hilda and Bernie Heinen moved in next door.  They had retired from the farm in rural Stearns County where they and generations of family had lived and where some still lived: still farmed and some still spoke a form of German compromised by a couple of generations away from the motherland, a couple of wars with which they did not want to be associated and a longing to be able to navigate the logistics required to make it through a trip into town, the stock yard or the grain elevator.  Hilda and Bernie’s English was good with irregularities common in our town that often interchanged the words borrow and lend as well as the words teach and learn and with an accent that hinted at the rural Minnesotan and German.  Lake Wobegon.

Mom and dad came from New Orleans, a different world where a few still spoke the last smatterings of Creole, but themselves spoke English that had no hint of the French that dominated many of the name places and was cultivated to distinguish them as Xavier University students.

Hilda and Bernie moved into town partly uninfected by much of the media bias that tainted most of America’s perception of African Americans.  Mom had learned well from her father and her own experience to meet people like you were meeting Jesus.

Hilda and Bernie were good people and good neighbors.  Mom and Hilda became good friends.  Better than the neighbors across the street who were related.  Better than most would have expected and better than most would have dared or bothered.

And most would not have expected the exchange that happened between mom and Hilda one afternoon while they stood in one of their front yards.

Hilda referred to to a black person using the word nigger.  That, in Stearns County, Minnesota and many other places would not be so unexpected–maybe for reasons other than why, on this day, the word came out of Hilda’s mouth.  What came next was truly unexpected.

Of course, my mom what stunned.  Surprised and stung in a way that hearing the word nigger always stings.  It is America’s ultimate unwelcoming–and we as black people know the unwelcome that comes with this word and a lot of other edifices that loom larger than a passing insult.

But mom was not mad.  It did not change her relationship with Hilda, like so many stinging encounters might.  Mom was hurt, but took a half moment to seek the best way to respond, maybe even asking God what to do.  She decided to do something that she might not have been able to do with many other people, with any other type of relationship and maybe not in today’s social spaces.

She told Hilda what that word meant: what it means in common language and what it felt in her ears and to the ears of someone who is or believes is the humanity of African Americans and other people who walk this earth.  Mom was kind and gentle–because she sensed that Hilda really didn’t know.

And she didn’t.  Hilda faced the biggest shame of her friendship with mom.  She really didn’t know and would not have wanted to hurt mother or anyone with the word if she knew what it meant.  Hilda could not have been sorrier.

What was so remarkable about this exchange was that this is not how we handle this issue in America and not many are willing or really have the honest, safe space to misstep and repair the damage.

What usually happens is that someone shouts “Nigger” to draw a line of supremacy.  The target of the slur either gets out of the way of the unhealthy and harmful verbal assault or responds with either the angry pain of the injury or a rebuttal that falls on the emotionally deaf or dumb.

Or maybe the response it an attempt to say how that kind of language and attitude is hurtful and damaging to common spaces, not much unlike what mom did with Hilda.  Where Hilda showed her exceptional nature was in her response.

Most of the time when we explain that this kind of language and other slights we encounter (and I hate to call them slights because there is nothing slight about systemic degradation and social, political and economic disadvantage), we get a response that complains that is dismissive, that we don’t have any reason to complain, that somehow they are entitled to speaking to and about us with impunity.

Instead, the two women chose to understand each other.

They made a space moved mom to choose Hilda as the person to whom she sent her two youngest after getting off the school bus for tending and a snack before her older kids got home.  It made a space that moved mom to be the primary helper for Hilda, more than her family who lived not far from us, or the once removed cousins who lived across the street when Bernie was dying of cancer.

The two women chose to share a space that most of America will not work to create, for which most of America is reluctant to work and that many do not want to exist.

After Bernie died, Hilda let her hair go white.  She let mom know how sad she was without him.  Mom worried, wiped tears and let her tell stories and shared a few of her own.  They were busy being Jesus for each other and entertain the angel they saw in each others’ eyes.

Fiction Spot: The Last Running Summer

THE LAST RUNNING SUMMER

Today, he has the memories of his childhood self running.  Running with his two legs.  Sometimes, he thinks those memories are dreams, fantasy images of a very young boy.  Sometimes the images are from the perspective of  himself running in his own body.  Sometimes he is the observer, dreams or memories of him running across the field with his cousins on those long, golden summer and autumn days.

He remembers the days that seemed to go on forever, the sun-scorched, coarse grass that was, in the later days of the season, slightly too long for the games of tag, touch football, kickball or whatever they chose on any given afternoon.  The days grew long, overlapping into dusk on that summer and fall stage of recollections.

The most vivid memories were of the games that played on even after the sun slipped below the horizon, lit by a lone utility light atop a pole not far from the house.  It was the kind of light they tell you about, warn you about in the middle of many country fields–the ones that they say not to walk to in an emergency because they look closer than they are–that one can parish  in the distant journey to that beacon whose welcome is illusion a siren especially in those snow-swept storms that used to visit the Midwest more than once each winter.

That summer and fall in 1965, Donny and his cousins benefited from the illusion that it was not time to come in for the supper the grownups ate while the playing kids’ plates cooled like the crispness of the first days of school that came after their fun.  Their parents let them play that summer–play past the small pangs of hunger forgotten amid the fun–or duty.  Past some bed times.  Past any concept of “future” that Donny’s four-year-old self could conjure.

They decided, between them, the grownups, that they would let the kids play–instruct the kids to play way beyond the regular boundaries of time, competition and exhaustion.  Some of the older kids knew.  The younger ones would know it time: know why, this summer, they were allowed to ignore the dinner bell, play past their hearts’ delight–play with respect for nothing except the rules of whatever game they were playing and a few bumps and bruises that often visit young bodies that run faster than the wind and the shouts of their names that sail the game into the next harbor of semi-organization.

And with respect for an attempt to let the little kids have as much fun as the bigger ones, especially Donny.
He remembers that summer, not knowing that his one shorter leg made him different.  The other kids saw him as  not much different than any other four-year-old who struggled to keep up with the faster, older kids, and not so different because everything about him was as normal as everything else the family and a few friends had always known about him.

The older cousins knew, partially from what their parents had shared with them, but more from overhearing hushed tones that the grownups felt forbidden to speak but felt the responsibility to share with each other: because that is the adults’ burden; or because they needed to talk through their fears; or because Donny’s problems were easier to talk about than their own problems, relationships, or shortcomings.  The older cousins, taking their first sip of grownup responsibility carried the burden of knowing why that summer, they played into the night, why they were told to play as long as Donny wanted to play, long beyond a four-year-old’s bed time.  As they grew older, they too carried memories of those days.

Donny remembers the illusion of running fast, an illusion created by the gentle prairie winds that blew across the golden fields and his still golden hair.  He was not fast. He was four.  He had one impossibly short leg.  He was the little cousin that the older kids made giggle and chased with no more speed than what would keep him in the game.

He did giggle–a lot.  He was happy.  It was the last summer when he had no inclination that there was anything wrong with his body and it was how the other kids saw him, just as kids see so many other truths with their naive intuition of integrity.

Soon, after the others were shuffled off to school, mostly out of sight and away from the taste of adult responsibility.  Almost like a poorly-kept secret, Donny would be shuffled off to what the doctors where sure was the right thing to do with The Impossibly Short Leg.  Sure that he would be better off without it.  Sure that the prosthesis which would be refitted many times over the course of his next decades, one that would fill his other pants leg the same as his longer leg, would be the best “cure” for Donny’s short leg and clubbed foot.

That fall, while his cousins and their friends played at recess, gym class, ran home from school, chased the girls, where chased by the boys who would otherwise imitate the football game they saw that weekend at the high school field or on television.  Meanwhile, the parents paced daily as if by doing so, they would come to some peace about the doctors’ decision or whether they explained what was about to happen to the little boy or their guilt over having caused Donny’s affliction or the curse that God had placed on their family: to have such an inflicted child.  Donny was having his shorter leg amputated, well above the knee.

Donny does not remember waking up from his surgery, nor the three others that were required before he could have a properly fitted prosthesis.  The encouragement given him by so many of the grownups didn’t register, subconsciously shutting down from the trauma, but giving the impression through his silence to the grownups that he was happy and taking this all in stride, taking care of grownup feelings.

He did not dwell on this change.  He avoided it as fiercely as he avoided the changes that came as his body introduced him to adolescence and avoided again when those changes brought on urges that he would not entertain because what girl wanted to be with a boy with only one leg?

When Donny was born, the nuns who served as the nurses in that Catholic hospital wondered to themselves and out loud, the same way as the disciples asked Christ of the lame man, was it the sins of his parents or the original sin of Donny that left him lame.  They, nor the doctors nor the parents waited for Christ to answer and, instead, wielded the tools God had left in their hands.

Jesus would have said, Donny’s condition is neither the result of his parents or his transgressions but exists in order that the glory and power of God can be demonstrated.  Or he would have said something like that, if our Bibles depict him honestly.  Then, he might have laid his hands on Donny, restoring the leg and showing his glory. Or maybe not.

The nuns, the doctors and the other well-meaning mortal sages were left with their own devices.  Whether they harbored notions that Donny’s parents’ sins brought them to this point, they made the best choice that their limited wisdom could see.  It was probably the right choice but could not have been as glorious as Jesus’.

The cousins would not see Donny again until Christmas at aunt Marilyn’s house–and this time, to them, Donny was “different.” This time, they felt sorry for him.  For the first time, they were fixed with the notion that there were things Donny could not do.  He was a new but familiar stranger and all of them were a little afraid.  The cousins did not know how to play with him.  They did not know how to talk with him.

The family’s  silence was matched by Donny’s who, that Christmas, spent most of his time in the big chair in the living room, next to the tree, mostly watching, with two shoes that hung identically beneath the cuffs of his brand new jeans.  Appearing unexceptional in his muted form, no one would ask of his condition, nor whose transgressions  were to blame, nor whose mortal glory might be stoked.

I Just Know He's My Brother

even branches, by Julia Klatt Singer
 
They are running tethered together
One blind, one sighted
Stride by stride, two men, moving as one.
Like the way birds fly, wing tip to wing
tip, they move as though they share
not only the same air, but the same thought.
Flowers bloom–whole fields of them–
Frogs croak in chorus.  Even branches
Know to sway, in much the same way
as the one above or below them.
What I wouldn’t give tonight to know
What wind, what song, what yearning
what kind world, what beginning, what
abandon I belong to.

**********************************

The scene is the field behind the church.  A comfortable Summer evening, church picnic with lots of games, lots of hot dish, cold salads and things off the grill.  Little games for the little kids.  Big games for the big kids.  Impromptu games for those who think they are bigger than that or cannot decide whether they are a big kid or a little kid, or wishing they could be both, even if they are neither.

I get pelted with a water balloon from a precocious Lisa Dahl.  I intend to retaliate, as I believe is her intention.  I am faster and a better aim and pelt her twice in the middle of the back with balloons that do not burst, much like the utopia of the distraction of a picnic from the fire and brimstone that is easily recalled inside the church walls.

Games.  We are obligated to the gunny sack race, the spoon and water relay, lawn darts.

Pastor prays before we eat.  Little children, fidgety men, and a couple of the gossipy ladies peak during the invocation.  I know what mother brought to the pot luck and promise to try the dishes others shared.

That year, my brother Michael is 20.  I am five years older.  We hover moments before the three-legged race, not with much intention, me reluctant to participate, but am vulnerable to the faint persuasions. I am not sure how much Michael wants to play, but I am guessing he wants to more than I do, wants to with more interest than his big brother, but as they begin to make the pairs, soon our legs are lashed together, standing at the start line.

We are told to take our marks.  We are commanded to get set. We are ordered to GO.

Michael and I start out awkwardly.  Stumbling.  Lost stride.  This is not going to work.  We are not the same athlete. We are not the same person.  We are not going to win.  We are last.

All my siblings: I love them.  We are four very distinct people carrying different virtues of our forebears, different personalities, different qualities that people know from knowing our parents. We each look like one of our parents but all have different noses and very different ways of making it through the world.

Neither of my two sisters are there, far enough away to not have to navigate the prospect of a three-legged race we would rather not run.   Before the race starts, I have no idea of how Michael and I will navigate, have no idea of where we will be when someone says “GO!” whether I will be in the race or comfortably on the sidelines, glad to let someone else have the fun, glad to be by myself.  I don’t understand how Michael and I were roped into the race, roped together, in that space. I did not need to know.

I also don’t understand how or why or see the moment when we suddenly broke into the most synchronized stride–running almost as if we were the same person, not just children of the same womb and sire.

We pass the other runners, outpace them by enough so that at the finish line, they have full views of our backs.

I can’t explain the feeling, that sudden burst of speed, whether it was his speed or mine, whether we began to hear the same drummer–what stride we fell into.  I don’t know what to say; I don’t know why.  I just know he’s my brother.

[Leave comments at http://theclarencewhiteblog.wordpress.com/2012/05/18/i-just-know-hes-my-brother/]

Home, Part 3

This is the last of a three part series.  See “Home, Part 1” and “Home, Part 2” in the previous two posts.  Wishing all of of you, whether I know you or not, a nice home weekend.

*******

What does it mean when our lover puts a toothbrush in the bathroom for us? What does it mean when we give them a key, and how is that key different from the key we leave with our neighbor for safe keeping? I remember a friend’s exclamation when her boyfriend gave her a drawer for her clothes at his house. Welcome. Trust. Love. Knowing we belong.

What happens when seeing that toothbrush in the morning is no longer a welcome site, or anything else that goes with that love, spouse? Years ago, a friend said, “I just need to get alone.” At first, we thought she was telling she needed a loan. “No,” she said, “I need to be alone.” She needed to move out of the apartment she shared (secretly without her parents knowing) with her boyfriend. 

What happens when we lose his or her trust or lose that trust in them? What happens when we fall out of love?

Maybe nothing. How many toothbrushes are sitting in the house, memories too precious to throw away and not willing to institute the insult of using them to scrub nooks and crannies? A found key: I know whose P.O. box it belongs to. No use giving it back; of no use in any way. A key. A toothbrush. A found sock.

A stack of strawberry soda that my grandmother used to keep in a room just off her kitchen. 

It was a mountain that never seemed to dwindle. The endless supply was meant not so much to lure her grandchildren as it was a message to her daughter that those grandchildren should spend more time with their grandmother. Even though we spent three weeks most summers of our childhood in New Orleans, grandma wanted mother to send us for longer, extended stays, long enough to make a dent in her proud pile of red “cold drink.” It was more than a hint. It was “proof,” of course, that we, her grandchildren BELONGED there, with her, the right of her grandmotherhood. 

That visit would never happen. Grandchildren grew into young adult grandchildren and then into adults. They became too busy to take a near month-long chunk out of their summer and then too old to really care about red cold drink. I don’t know if she, little by little, gave the soda away to the neighbor children, if they were slowly pilfered by the one son she had who never really got his life together or if a large pile of soda was her only company when she was stricken by the stroke that would, in little time take her life. 

In the quarter century since her passing, I have wondered who else would sit all day on the front stoop waiting for me come arrive in a place that was especially for me. I wonder for whom I will sit on that stoop. Is the extra toothbrush in the linen closet just another pile of strawberry soda sitting in the back room?

Like grandma, we sit and imagine the object of our love. We wait with toothbrush, special tea, special cereal, whatever white or colorful noise helps them sleep. We want to create a space that will prompt someone to ask as that love ventures without knocking to cross our threshold, “Do you live here?” We look to have such a place of our own; we long to find other places were those we love make us belong.

On that late spring afternoon, I walked into Mary’s house, as I had so many other days, like I lived there. On that or any other day, another friend might have walked through the unlocked door and waited for Mary, sitting on the day bed on which that they would not have guessed—or bothered to think that she and I had made love. 

Others would walk into the kitchen and wait for her and wait for one of the many important discussions we had there that could change the world, if only it would listen. That John walked in with me and that a dozen others would soon follow, I confined the two of us to the living room, bathroom and kitchen. We waited. Other days, I waited: waited on that day bed; waited in the kitchen; waited with open cupboards as the contents of those cupboards waited for me; waited in the quiet white walls and no noise in the bed of the farthest back bedroom, free, welcome and wanted. I was free to fall asleep, lie awake, make myself at home.

(Leave comments at http://theclarencewhiteblog.wordpress.com/2012/02/03/home-part-3/)

Home, Part 2

When we were kids, our grandma and grandpa had a television in every room (except the bathroom). They never moved from the side-by-side, shotgun duplex, the last of the properties of several they had owned and grandpa had tended over the years. The background squawk of the TVs was as constant as the simmering pots on the stove.
I don't know what grandma's favorite show was or even if she paid attention. White noise. Colorful noise, maybe blunted by the power and color of her personality. It mostly played in the kitchen, toward the back of the house, much of which had been built by grandpa. At one point in the house's history, the kitchen was the back of the house. Mom told tales of trips to the outhouse, even as inner City of New Orleans dwellers.

Whatever grandma's favorite show was, grandma knew that all of the people in them had indoor bathrooms, just like her, and likely had more than one color TV—maybe in every room, just like her. Toward the front of the house, the televisions rarely played. Instead, the sound of a bar across the street often filled the air. An ironic coexistence, given that grandpa was a Baptist preacher and did not set foot in the establishment. It was an ironic coexistence with his step son who lived in a tiny living space upstairs with its own entrance who regularly stepped into that establishment.

Ironic? Uneasy? Maybe neither. All these things belonged. Was it a sense of humor or a load of tolerance—or maybe an exercise of non-judgmental Christian love—a test of the church's Great Commission playing itself out, a world across the street that begged the preacher man to save then; and a man who was more willing to open that door than his wife was eager to accept.

Or a test provided by grandpa's eldest granddaughter who, on a Sunday morning, dressed finely for the good church people to see, one of four shiny, cared for grandchildren of whom he was much too proud, would peer into that magic TV box at American Bandstand, full of gyrating young people running afoul of the expectations of that sacred day and afoul of young Christian lady conduct in general.

But she loved to dance. She loved dance, a student of people moving to music, to the beat and of their hearts' desires, still too early in life to have an understanding of what all those desires were, but knowing of them—enough of them to watch, not getting to close and knowing that she could watch because she was her grandfather's granddaughter.

The TV would be turned off not from disapproval, even as my mother and I lived moments of uneasiness, appropriately worried about hurting grandpa's sensitivities, feelings or the equilibrium of moral order. The TV was turned off because it was time to go to a church service at which grandpa would preach, that would last hours and would be capped off with a score of fawning middle-aged women who had to meet grandma and grandpa's beautiful grandchildren.
Those three-week summer visits were punctuated on the front end by grandma's vigilant wait on the front stoop for a weary carload of Minnesota kids to show up at the house on Roman Street. We would arrive as new-again strangers who would ease into the growing familiarity that, at some point, devolved into mostly-hollow threats from grandma saying that if we did not behave, we'd get a whipping so bad we would not be able to sit down for a week.
 
********
Next week, the final installment (I think) of “Home.” Be sure to check out the first installment at: http://theclarencewhiteblog.wordpress.com/2012/01/20/home-part-1/. In the mean time, tell the rest of us what home means to you.

A Child’s Thanksgiving Leftovers

My friend Judith said today that she wondered what other people's attitude was about Thanksgiving leftovers. I know what my father thinks.

Other than the red beans and rice that were a staple of his childhood and that my mother still cooks for him and her children and a grandson who has the greatest affinity for them, the one thing that dad could eat every day is leftover Thanksgiving turkey.

There was a time when I was not sure if this affinity was one of convenience, necessity or of a favorite taste on the pallet and stomach. My mother assures me that it is a favorite. My introduction to this affinity made it not so clear.

A day or two after the Thanksgiving when I was four and my sister was three, we found ourselves, for several days, in a one-parent house. Mom was in the hospital. Dad was left alone to take care of us. Lucky for him, he had what was left of a 24-pound turkey and other fixings that were never going to be consumed by two people and two little kids.

So, the first day, we had Thanksgiving leftovers. Easy enough. They second day? We had Thanksgiving leftovers. The third day, dad served Thanksgiving leftovers. It was either on that day or the next that my father's two lovely children sat at the dinner table, not moving a muscle, not lifting a fork and not budging an inch in spite of dad's urging us to eat.

Dad was not a clean-the-plate kind of person, but it was important that his kids get nourishment, and excuse from the table was did not come unless enough of the right nutrients made their way into our bodies, enough protein, enough green, yellow or orange vegetable and enough to make his kids healthy. So, it must have been some kind of pity, mercy or grace with which he viewed his children's sad faces, tired of turkey, tired of missing mom, and too tired to know we were hungry.

I suppose dad was tired, too. He did a good job in mom's absence. We were well cared for and generally were in good spirits in spite of knowing mom was not there. We did miss her. I can only imagine his sadness, as he relented and packed us up to go to McDonald's. Sadness for his kids, who endured without mom, without something new to eat. Sadness that his lovely bride was in the hospital. Sad from fatigue.

It was many years before we know why mom went to the hospital. That holiday weekend, she almost lost the pregnancy that would in months become my brother Michael. I am still amazed at how my parents handled this episode. I remember being woken up early in the morning. Mom stood in the kitchen. I don't remember much except that they told us that mommy had to go to the hospital—right now. I remember mom holding herself up by the kitchen counter on one side and dad's strong arms on her other.

I remember that during one of the most frightening events a couple can go through, my parents said that everything was going to be alright, that mommy was going to be fine, but they also instilled in their children, with some kind of calm spirit, that everything was going to be alright. We were not afraid. Even for the trip to the hospital, we were well cared for.

Mom and dad did this with such skill, care and love. Kind of like today's President, there was no drama—at least not for us kids.

Months later, mom and dad felt confident enough to talk to us about having a baby brother or sister. We still wondered where this baby was going to come from, where would we get it. I think at one point, I asked if we went to a baby store to pick it out. And that May, we had a baby brother. We were kids. And four days of Thanksgiving leftovers was a small price for my sister and I to pay for him. It was a great reward for what my mother endured and the character, faith and enough judgment to know when to let the kids have McDonald's that pulled us through.

I do remember sitting speechless at the dinner table that November. But I can only imagine what was going through dad's head and what was in his heart that evening as we opened the wrapped hamburgers and placed the french fries in the messy pools of ketchup three- and four-year-olds make. I have sat at McDonald's, being a dad in speechless moments, hoping the hamburgers and play room would sufficiently mask hints of sadness on the face of my son's dad. I wonder if I have been so good at freeing my son of such burdens of the grown-up.

This year, I still have some leftovers from Thanksgiving in my ice box. I will have to finish them soon, frozen or not. They are quite good. Not just turkey. New Orleans gumbo. Mom makes it every holiday season. But I still know when it's time to eat out. At least I think I do.

If you have any leftovers stories, I'd be glad to hear them. Share them here, if you like. Or any holiday story. Especially the Thanksgiving ones. Good or bad. Funny or not. I don't want to forget.

Counting the Places at the Thanksgiving Table

November 25, 2011

.It is one’s duty to be thankful at this time of year. I see and hear so many statements of thanks. Enough to create more than just a little dissonance when I see them pasted next to pictures of our real world. Still, maybe today’s lesson is that thanks is not the antithesis of those sometimes sad pictures. Hard days sometimes accentuate those things.

This Thanksgiving Day was, like many others, was spent at my parents’ house. Mom and dad have made a good home, always a good place to be. It is a good place to visit, for me. It has proven to be a great place for others whom we have invited over the years and my parents are people who I love to show off.

This Thanksgiving morning, my son and I rode up to mom and dad’s, a happy escape from a hard week. It was a quite drive, this time with no radio and only a book in my son’s lap, leaving his hand-held video games unlit beside him. The silence let in a lot of thoughts from the previous days, things I guess I needed to talk about and may tell you later—and some that I will not, but all things that I need to process. (Maybe some of today’s stories will make enough sense and find the right emotional space to retell, and maybe, with time, wisdom will tell me that there is no story.) Apart from the half hour slowdown as we left the outer ring suburbs, the speed of our trek let my thoughts disappear in the slipstream and vaporize on the freeway.

Grandma was so excited to see her grandson, the first of three grandchildren to arrive, she almost forgot to greet me, her first of four children. The other grandchildren would follow, with their parents. What was different this year, is that there were no friends, no neighbors, and no strays who mom and dad so kindly invite into their home on a day that should be shared.

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. It is a holiday where everyone is supposed to be welcome without having to fake obligation to a particular religious perspective, and a time when people can just get together to be with each other around a special meal. And be reminded why everyone who joins us around that table is special. No obligation to buy the right gift or spend money we need but don’t have on things we don’t have or need and no code besides a heightened idea of how we should treat and enjoy people we know well or met for the first time.

What is missing is more than just the chance to show off mom and dad—two people who are more than worth showing off; more than the stories we get to retell to guests who have missed the previous 40 Thanksgivings at our house, but have to be shared, especially the ones that embarrass one of us.
This year, there were few stories. This is the first time in a couple of years that we’ve been guestless, and as much as I love my family, my siblings, my nieces, my parents and my son, this year’s empty places at the table left an empty place in my heart and a lots opportunity to share the a great spirit with which I was raised with people who are special by their being there.
I am thankful, without grudge, for the blessing of having this place, this home to call my own and from time to time to give to people I love and people who need to receive the love that lives at mom and dad’s. Driving home, the freeway, I am left again with my thoughts, including all the reasons why there were no Happy Thanksgiving visitors, but, also why and how I am blessed to have the place share.
It has been a hard week and I know I have a hard week to come. And, yes, I am still thankful.

Love Lessons

My friend Linda started her blog post this week, “Mom? Dad? What are You Doing Here?”  with a quote. I will steal it. I steal it because I have something else to say about it. I steal it because, in essential ways, we are telling parallel stories, learning parallel lessons.

“Whatever your eye falls on – for it will fall on what you love – will lead you to the questions of your life, the questions that are incumbent upon you to answer, because that is how the mind works in concert with the eye. The things of this world draw us where we need to go." — Mary Rose O’Reilley (The Barn at the End of the World: The Apprenticeship of a Quaker, Buddhist Shepherd)

Love must serve some purpose, but there are some types of love for which I am struggling to learn the lessons.

And what happens when those lessons of love are lost, do not get learned? Are we doomed to repeat them? I think maybe so. But we are still drawn—days to nights, drawn like a ship to a siren.

We are drawn until the lesson has run out and so has the supply of love, until the next time. How much of the lesson will we capture this time around?

For Linda, these love lessons are getting pulled into her life with her family. I have the fortune—or misfortune—to be leaning them through relationships of choice. Not such a simple choice. Drawn by the eye, mind and heart.

And I realize that these lessons are not just ones of resistance. It is not a lesson of how to control, master or submit to them. Maybe it is the task to salvage the love from them, maybe shedding some poison or lie from an apple of lore that sours the true love we have. Maybe the lesson is to realize that we are not the poison, but the poison's leaving is almost never something we can make happen by our own efforts, virtue or even the love itself. What it's not: it is not trying to fix past relationships or just our past with new relationships. Or maybe it is.

This week, I was an uninvited but timely and welcome witness to Linda confronting the poison of one of her loves. I watched a powerful woman consumed by the lies and half truths, as she likes to call them, that built her family of origin's love on shifting sands of unreality. I saw her take leave of the lesson that she has learned well, just for a brief moment, that is an emotional home on more solid ground. I saw the vessel of love crack, spilling its contents in a helpless gush for those moments, like a loss of a kind of faith that allowed Peter, so briefly, to walk on the water. I saw her fall back to the identity of the little girl who knew no other reality than the that thought the half-truths and secrets were a normal reality.

And as I watched and listened, I received a lesson of my own. About the half-truths with which I live—the ones of which I been convinced and some that I have created, or co-created by my tacit acceptance—and the “little girl” I become when I miss my own lessons and lost loves.  And even as I write this, I can see one lesson that I am avoiding.

These are lessons I will have to visit again. Will I visit them with the faith of Peter or the Peter of lost faith. I often try and keep that faith on track like someone trying to balance a bicycle by leaning one way or the other rather than by the physics of motion. This failing is easy to see watching someone else ride the bike. Not so easy to see on one's self. The bike is a lesson of the heart.

Emotional Rescue

I know my father is a very emotional man. It has taken a long time to lean this, and I am still learning it. I've learned this through time, small gains in wisdom, the words of my mother and maybe from being a dad myself. His emotion shows. It shows large, but rarely on his sleeve.  You could say still waters run deep, but the river's current is swift.

There are times when you can't or don't want to show that emotion, let it direct your steps. No one knows this better than any Black man growing up and living in the United States. No one knows this better than a Black father who does not want his children infected even more deeply than the hurt of the racial politics of the sandbox. It's not easy. It is basic for survival. Sometimes, it just comes in handy.

Sometimes, it is nice to not seem so frightened when you are frightened. Sometimes, it makes sense to let everyone else think things are okay when they are not. Sometimes it makes sense to tell yourself and your body that things are okay when they are not.

One evening, at the dinner table, things were not okay. Mom was choking on a piece of meat. Panic. The four of us children sat in stunned, paralyzed terror—a tacit ohmygod, ohmygod, oh... Mom: well, she was choking.

Our hearts were racing, eyes wide, our forks still, no click or clank. Father calmly put down his utensils, got up and walked to the side of mother's chair. He helped her to rise from her chair, got behind her and performed a Heimlich maneuver.

Done, he calmly returned to his seat. So did mother. We all sat, quietly, not quite as if nothing happened, but in a quiet that filled the void of what would have been a collective hysteria.

Just as he had not jumped up like some rescuing hero, like so many men, waiting to see if the cameras where rolling or at least someone was going to identify him as the savior, he did not wait for or want any fawning gratitude or a honey-you-saved-me-my-hero-man-so-superior. He did not treat her like a child. He did not milk the trauma. Is life lessons taught him that doing so was never a good thing.

I think what he would have wanted to say is, “Kids, make SURE you chew your food properly,” but after that event, he really didn't need to.

Maybe that evening, mom and dad shared some thoughts and feelings about the evening's event. I don't know. I am sure that father made sure that it was more about digestion than “saving.” I am sure that both of them were more concerned about the four of us kids. For us kids, it was another of those false lessons that perpetuated illusions of immortality and that even the most scary things can be taken care of by mom and dad.

I know that night was not the only time in his life that my father had to double check his emotions, capturing the energy from the dire urgency while, at the same time, not letting the wildness of that energy derail the solution. He has had to do that with other emotions, as well, for the tears of sorrow and joy, holding his tongue and fists against people who have deserved more than just a tongue lashing or more than a simple slap upside the head.

He does not yell. He does not hit. He will if he has to, on the rare life occasion when such things are truly necessary. (He grew up in a neighborhood where you had to know how to fight.) I am wondering how well I have learned any of those lessons. Sometimes those lessons show more than my emotions. Once in a while, the lesson is lost, and my emotions get the better of me—but not too many people see this. People wonder why I seem so solemn.

So, as I write this, I feel like maybe I have told you more than my family wants you to know. But it is easier today to write this than to write of the events of the past two days that, for some reason, reminded me of this story, about love, anger, fear, how love defeats fear and anger, and of the limitations that our mortal selves put on the infinite capacity of love.

Maybe I can tell today's story soon. Maybe after I have lived a little more of it—or maybe today's story is short enough so that it will achieve the emotional space for telling, a space where I will not jump up in hysteria, begging for attention, a righteous hero.

The only thing I know that fits in today's string of words is that some levels of anger require a lot of love to muster, and hopefully some wisdom lets the love win.

Keep listening. When I learn today's lesson (or think I have), I'll let you know.

Senior Skip Day

Senior Skip Day was my favorite day of high school.

On the face, this may seem to be no surprise. For many, this would be a statement about how much they did not like high school, or maybe how much they liked to party—or a combination of the two with an inconclusive understanding of causality. On my senior skip day, I missed the party.

I missed all of the parties in high school. I heard about the parties—or overheard about the, on Monday mornings in the open period before home room in the cafeteria or at lunch later that day. I never knew where any of the parties were. I was not included. I could count the number of reasons why, all true and none easy to verify. But being left out opened the door to a great day late one May my last year of high school.

I arrived at school that morning, seeing a street filled with cars, trucks, a boat--vehicles all loaded with beach fun and provisions to aid the festivities. It seems that the only thing I had in common with most of them was that I was armed with a note from my parents excusing me from attendance for most of the school day.

I don't know what most parents thought about writing this excused absence note for their kid. What is it that they thought they were providing their kids? I am sure that some kids knew their parents would not write such a note: no such note to miss school for no good reason, much less for the opportunity to party with lots of alcohol and youngsters of the “opposite” sex, unsupervised by any adults and at a location disclosed only to those who would be driving there via a quickly mimeographed, last-minute map.

I don't remember what mine said. It was respectfully crafted. I don't remember which parent signed it, and actually, was likely dictated by me, crafted so that I would have an excused absence and be eligible to attend baseball practice the next day.

All the seniors attended home room. Not many were dressed in anything that was appropriate for a day of school. Not that it was necessary, either for the day or in a useless attempt to fool teachers or the administration.

Home room let out. There was a mad dash to the waiting cars and vehicles that soon would be pointed to someone's lakeside property, somewhere in Stearns or Benton County in central Minnesota. I walked slowly and empty-handed to the old Buick Estate Wagon that I used to drop mom off at work less than an hour earlier. I got in and made my way to one of the other high schools in town, one of the public schools where my girlfriend Lisa attended.

Missing senior skip was no matter. I did not feel that feeling of being left out-- again. Rather, I did not notice I was being left out. I was also in love.

Calling me smitten would have been an understatement as would any literal description of the heart break that visited both Lisa and me in our youthful helplessness delivered by the hands of highly cultivated, culturally aged intolerance.

I spend Lisa's free period with her in the student commons, having a tender conversation, holding hands and staring into the eyes of the cutest and smartest girl that, to that point in life, ventured onto my radar.

Lisa and I talked and then I walked her to her French class. There, we met her best friend, anther smart girl, and waited for “Madame.”

Madame was Mrs. Anderson. She taught me for two failed years of French as a freshman and sophomore. I was a silly little boy who was a bad student and didn't have enough of a clue about the parts of English speech to apply them to the French version in class.

When I had Madame, she spent a lot of time talking to the girls in the small class. There where four boys and almost a dozen girls. The boys talked amongst ourselves as the beginning of each class was filled with cool, grown-up girl talk.

This day, with Lisa, was different. I had not become one of the girls, but I had become something—someone worth talking to.

Instead of the first part of this class being taken up with the girl talk (and Lisa's class was even more strongly represented by girls than mine had a couple of years before), it was filled with me talking to Madame.

Okay, is there a better way to impress you girlfriend than by taking over a huge chunk of one of her favorite teacher's class time with a conversation that gave me more attention than any silly-boy, ninth grader could ever get? If your girlfriend is one of the smart kids, there really isn't anything better.

I said good-bye to Madame and the cutest, smartest girl in the world and left to meet my dad at his work, which was not far from Lisa's high school.

Dad took off the afternoon from work and we played a round of golf. It was a habit that had lasted, to that point, about a decade during the springs and summers, but rarely on a school or work day. Golf was followed by a late lunch trip to....Burger King.

Burger King was good. It was not a feast of food, but a feast of conversation. Or a feast of having a dad who would take off from the middle of a work day to spend some earnest time with one of his sons.

I remember little of what was said. I remember that we lingered. I am sure dad asked me about my thoughts about the future. I am sure that I evaded some of his questions, ones that were hard enough to think about much less answer. We got our food fast but the conversation was not.

Even though I do not remember many specifics of what was said, I remember one other thing he said, more clearly than anything. He delivered a simple message: I could go out with whomever I wanted.

Seems kind of simple—and kind of odd, but the backdrop of the statement held many more words than the brief sentences he spoke near the end of our talk. Growing up as a black kid in an almost completely white town, it meant that if I was going to have any kind of social life, I was going to date someone who was white— with all the treacheries that come with transgressing the often unspoken and sometimes overtly stated apartheid of that time in history and the cultivated segregation of that subculture. Except to most people who had gotten to know our family, we were at least marginally unwelcome, and the idea that I might date was an offense many degrees to the bad.

I did not know what sense dad had about the unease I was living with—and the fear I felt and the sometimes tacit, sometimes overt hostility that I faced. I did not know if he sensed that it was a current issue in my relationship with Lisa. I did not know if Lisa's father, who worked at the same place as my dad, had said something to my dad about Lisa and me.

I didn't say much in response. He wanted be be sure that I understood what he said. I mumbled an okay, dad. We finished our late lunch and I drove dad back to work so he could clean up his desk before the end of the day.

I was buoyed by two grand conversations. I felt thoroughly adored and respected. I was lovable, smart, attractive and worth more than anything in the world.

That Skip Day was glorious. The next school day, everyone was back at school, talking about the party just as they did every other weekend. There was a discussion among the senior baseball players who held a mock accountability session for what they might, hypothetically, have done that might, hypothetically, transgress Minnesota State High School League Rules.

Even though I did make it to a couple of parties before summer really got underway, I realized that I did not like drinking or teenage drinkers enough to make me come to the conclusion that I had missed something by being excluded.

Not long after, the luster on the mutual infatuation between Lisa and me dulled under the social pressures of the realities of the day. It was not Lisa's father who really objected. It was her mom, who stood in the way, telling me, one evening, “I thought I told you to never call here again.”

Neither this, nor anything else dulled my memory of the best day of high school I ever had. I didn't miss anything.

Holiday Lessons from a Tape Recorder

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. I could give you a lot of reasons why, and maybe I can't share all of them here, but one of the major reasons is that it is not Christmas.

For most adults, the winter holiday season is one of stress, obligation and financial compromise. We think it's simple for kids, but it can be even more complicated, as I honestly recall some of my childhood experiences. I also see holidays becoming more difficult in the lives of a lot of kids, given what they are going through today. What lesson should we learn from all of this? There are plenty, but we have not been such great students of life on this matter.

I learned one lesson the Christmas when I was 11. For some reason, I earnestly wanted a tape recorder. I am not sure why. There is not a whole lot one can do with a tape recorder, but record sound, and I am still not ingenious enough to understand the art of (or reason for) identifying and capturing sounds. It is enough to say that the technology was not as common-place as it is today, though not terribly inaccessible.

That Christmas, I got the tape recorder. I found it under the tree, unwrapped it with appropriate haste and recklessness, and marveled for a moment, or two—or maybe three. What followed in the next several hours were a series of lessons unfolded that, to this day, mark my understanding of the Christmas holiday, myself, and how I prefer to celebrate—or not.

The first lesson I learned was one that I should have taken to in all the previous years of Christmases: that the shine and allure of just about any gift will lose its luster soon after opening—if not after a few days of play. After a few times of playing my voice back, I realized that even that odd phenomenon was not as exciting and compelling as the thrill of finding and opening gifts under the tree—which my other siblings were still doing.

You have to remember that back then, tape recorders were expensive. While my parents would indulge in the thrill of seeing their kids open gifts they wanted with glee on Christmas morning, they also were frugal enough to not overindulge their children, nor spend so much more on one child to the point that it would be financially compromising or even disadvantageous to grant so many wishes. I don't think we even need to mention the tendency to develop undesirable orientations toward materialistic priorities or the displacement of the most important focus of the holiday.

Tape recorders cost a lot back then. Besides the pajamas, socks and mittens, the tape recorder was all I received for Christmas. My eye darted from gift to gift under the tree until I realized that all of the presents had someone else's name on them. Was there nothing more?

I began to feel sorry from myself. I think I sat for a while, on one of the living room chairs, quiet with my long fingers lightly pressing the buttons of the tape recorder. Then, a moment of self-consciousness overcame me, and my pity turned to a shade of shame.

Somehow, my 11-year-old self came to realize in that instant the shallowness and selfishness of my attitude. I realized the total inappropriateness of my disposition and misplaced value on the season.

I realized that I had even misplaced the value of the fact that our family was there, at home, all together, warm with a fire in the fireplace, on a very cold mid-western December morning. I don't think I could articulated it so well then. I just knew there was something wrong, something about which I could feel some shame, something wrong with feeling that I was getting less when, by any decent set of values, I should have been counting my blessings.

I do not know what I asked for the next year. I do not think I looked at the JCPenny and Sears catalogs with as much the same allure. I was different for the experience.

I was different in other ways. I was in junior high, on the verge of my first real crush, living with uncertain footing, no longer being among the Big Men on Campus of the 6^th grade. I gave up trick-or-treating. I was trying to convince the basketball coach that it was okay for me to play hockey as well—and miss basketball games in order to go to hockey practice.

Still, I have to say, the lesson took. I approach Christmas morning with the anticipation of seeing loved ones and sharing a wonderful dinner later in the day (and maybe a football game playing on the television in the background), much like Thanksgiving. I cannot say, even though I have not a lot of material wealth, I have been cured of materialistic tendencies. But I really do not care what is under the tree nearly as much as I care about who is gathered around it.

It was a lesson much harder learned but equally valuable as when my father told me the truth about Santa Claus. (More on that later, too.) When I finally convinced my mom that we should stop exchanging material presents (a rule that she likes to break), Christmas became a much more enjoyable holiday. (We still make sure kids get presents. Not sure what the impact of that is on them—a distraction from the Christ story, from the importance of family, the joy of having at least one day off—if not two weeks at the end of the year: A day or two week to not leave the house and admire those pajamas that grandma sent!)

So I am anticipating the days of Christmas. For only the second time in almost five decades, we will be missing one person around the tree from our six-member immediate family, which is quite a record. (Aunt/Sister Jennifer will be with in-laws.) We have been spared many of the realities of life beyond geography, in-laws and the burdens of each that make it difficult if not impossible for a lot of families to spend holidays together.

I will watch my child play with his cousins. I will see the contentment of my parents at having their grandchildren happy in their home. I will have a great meal (if my stomach decides to start cooperating by then). I will be around people I love. And maybe I will get a present: I think it will be socks. Thanks, mom and dad.