To The Table: About Thanksgiving

I think holidays are almost always about the past. Maybe that’s because we are almost always about the past, a compendium of it: expectations, moments of connection, old wounds, fears, loves, hopes, and remembrances. All of these within us meet all of these within everyone we join with at the holidays. Is it any wonder there is so much navigating and negotiating to do?

This year we had two less places at the table. I could say three because my aunt and her nuclear family went to their in-laws, but this is not the same. They will be among us again, another year, another time. Permanently, we have two less places, my grandparents. Last night, Thanksgiving, we continue another year of ‘the firsts.’ We did them for my grandma. Now, we are doing them again. We are racing to the close, nearing the last days.

I could see us all negotiating, remembering, forgetting, struggling and finding the way through the day. All of us bumped up against the changes, listened to our internal dialogues while the external ones flew about us. I could see it when my aunt asked for too many chairs to be brought into the dining room, the way we could barely get the names out during the prayer, the way my uncle sat to my left at the head of the table, the place where my grandfather had been two year before as we sat through thanksgiving without my grandma. I was not in a good place that day and I remember him helping me through it with a look and a light touch of his hand on mine.

This year I found my grandma’s eyes looking back at me from my cousin. I was watching him while we were all busy with dessert. My friend and fellow writer, Liesl Jobson, wrote a poem called “Genetic Gift;” I suppose this is exactly what we have, gifts, signs of those who have come before us, genetic and otherwise. We carry them in the strands of our DNA. We carry them in our pasts and bring them with us to the table.