Man Of This Season

My in-laws were married at Thanksgiving time, tying the knot on November 22, 1946, nearly two decades before that date became infamous. On their 17th wedding anniversary, when my wife was 8, they went out to dinner on a very quiet Dallas Friday night, blood drops still lingering in Dealey Plaza.

Ugh. Sorry about that imagery. The emptiness of the restaurant is what I remember them talking about. Just bad timing.

What was on my mind was how Thanksgivings have changed over the course of our marriage. Not your Thanksgivings, how would I know? Just ours.

And just in minor ways. Our first one in Seattle was miserable, Julie feeling lonely and isolated, even though we had dinner with friends (they were my friends, for one thing).

The next year, she was pregnant, three weeks from delivery, and we held it at our small apartment, stuffed with food and friends. A couple of months before this, I’d splurged on a video camera in anticipation of offspring, so I have some video of that Thanksgiving, sort of famous images now in our little group, the swelling belly of my lovely wife, the enormous amounts of food, everybody in the room smoking at once. Still life in 1983.

But I was thinking of my in-laws, the people I mostly associate with Thanksgiving over the past few decades – we spent at least two of them in Dallas, around their 40th and 50th wedding anniversaries, and then they began an annual tradition of flying out to Seattle for the holiday. The last time was in 2001; the increased airport security and a particularly bad delay persuaded them to no longer fly the less friendly skies, and they never returned up here.

And our Thanksgivings became a little unmoored then, sometimes pretty lonely for a few years – when Beth was in college at North Texas, she’d drive down to her grandparents’ house for the day, and we’d manage with sometimes just the three of us. Beth and Cameron have been here a couple of times, lots of fun, and then over the past decade we’ve mostly hung out with friends, not here. It’s become an easy affair with no clean-up (but no turkey sandwiches), requiring us to make only side dishes and then there’d always be plenty; it’s never necessary, just fun.

So let the fun begin already.

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I’ve decided to make Scottish tablet for Thanksgiving, hardly cooking, mostly stirring. Tablet is kind of Scottish fudge, except without chocolate or really anything but sugar. Condensed milk, some cream, and a bunch of sugar, that’s it. It has a slightly grainy texture and a bizarre effect when it hits the tongue, a rush of sweetness that seems ominous. I sort of expect teeth to fall out.

I’m also going to try a recipe for an apple galette (really a pie, sort of a pie-cake thing), and then bread, of course. I’d normally make a bunch of chocolate chip cookies, but I do that routinely now, once a week or so, and it feels too normal for a holiday. Although it feels weird not to be baking with chocolate at all.

There’ll be tons of food, as always, and I’ll spend the day with some of the people I love the most, all good.

For all the conversation around gratitude and blessings, this is never a particularly churchy time for us, at least compared to Christmas and Easter. It’s truly a time to relax and appreciate, to dwell in the feels, to force the happiness. It just feels right to be happy, which is sort of the point of gratitude.

Happiness doesn’t seem like it should be a choice, although there you go. I’m not exactly humming, but I have some warm feelings this week, anticipating the day, the conversations, the smells of fine food charging the atmosphere like static electricity, and if we can be excused for not focusing as much as we should on being thankful, it’s still part of the picture.

I’ve always got a lot on my gratitude plate, and this year is no different. This is my 14th Thanksgiving in a sober life, and that’s enough right there. I had a spectacular summer, a season for the ages. I had several visits with my grandson, which bubbles for a while afterward and sustains me, always.

But mostly, this year, I’m grateful for my wife. She had a lovely sabbatical, time to reflect and contemplate, to create, to discover and rediscover, three months of few demands, and it made a difference.

She has a wonderful school schedule, still hard and long days but not particularly early or all that late. She minds her sleep these days, as we both do, protectively and enthusiastically. Can’t do it without sleep.

Yesterday she pointed out a laundry basket stuffed with her clothes, and asked me to toss them in the wash should I remember. Laundry day was overdue, anyway, so I did hers first, and while my next load was in the dryer I lugged that basket back upstairs.

We rarely work in concert in this household, and that suits us. Schedules and preferences lead us to solitary meals, often, and we read and watch what we want, the three of us, rarely doing it together. This is not a bad thing at all; not my point. It’s how we roll.

And we do our own laundry. It just worked out that way, and it’s easier. I don’t lose so many socks, and shirts rarely go missing anymore (they tend to get stolen, not lost).

So this was different, and I needed something more to do in order to continue to listen to an interesting podcast, so I folded her clothes and it was wonderful.

They were warm and soft, mostly shirts and pants, and while she probably refolded a few and tossed some others in a drawer, it’s always nice when someone folds your clothes, c’mon. It’s a treat, or it seems to me, and an easy gift for me, and a blessing. It took me 10 minutes, tops, and I realized it felt like a very Thanksgiving thing to do.

It wasn’t a movie moment. I didn’t grab a sweater and take a deep breath, remembering her smell. She hadn’t been gone that long, and she came back. There wasn’t anything weird.

I just folded her clothes, and it felt like a gift. I think I was humming, too.