Thanksgiving

Someone smashed my granddaughter’s pumpkin.  It was hard to get a five-year-old to wrap her mind around such atrocity, but it was my job to buy her a new pumpkin, and on the day before Halloween there was none to be found.  A farm stand and two garden centers had closed for the season.  The display of pumpkins in front of Shaw’s was gone, and Wal-Mart was sold out.

Had I wanted Christmas decorations, they were available.  I hope to eventually be possessed by the Christmas spirit, but not yet.  I love Christmas, but I can’t sustain it for two months.  I remarked to Annette that it wouldn’t be long before radio stations would be playing carols twenty-four/ seven. 

Nothing could make me hate “Away in a Manger” and “Silent Night” except constant repetition.  One year the building that housed my office had an outdoor speaker near the window that broadcast a short tape of music that featured “It’s a Holly-Jolly Christmas.”  I hate the song to this day.  I like Burl Ives just fine, and the song has a cheerful lilt that I wouldn’t find objectionable if I hadn’t been driven crazy by it when I was trying to get some work done. 

I make it a point to avoid listening to Christmas music before Thanksgiving.  If I can’t get away from it I employ a technique perfected by eastern holy men for spiritual peace amid the clamor of the world, which involves slow breathing from the diaphragm and the holy syllable ooom.

Besides wanting to appreciate Christmas when the time arrives, I want to anticipate Thanksgiving.  It’s a holiday that has much to recommend it.  For one thing, it cannot be over-commercialized. 

Oh they try.  Supermarkets have specials on turkeys, and it’s a big season for Ocean Spray and One-Pie canned pumpkin.  Turnips, which never top the charts, make a brave showing, and for reasons that escape me, stores  sell a lot of canned fried onions to go on top of green beans.  There are Thanksgiving cards, but not everybody sends them.

Thanksgiving music is the kind you sing in church.  If “Come Ye Thankful People, Come” has been recorded, I don’t know by whom. I do get out my Godspell CD and listen to “I Really Wanna Thank You, Lord,” which I guess is the Thanksgiving equivalent of “It’s a Holly-Jolly Christmas,” but I don’t play it more than twice. 

Restaurants do a big business, but Thanksgiving dinner is still very much a homemade meal.  People who seldom cook consult the Turkey Hotline to find out what to do if they left the giblet bag in the bird.  Guests bring their specialties, and many recipes have been passed down.  There’s no great spending orgy, which I suppose is why the media tries to get you to move on to Christmas before the trick-or-treat candy is gone. 

Christmas tells the story of the birth of Christ, but it’s also a celebration of winter. It’s a time for Santa Claus ritual and lore, a season of partying that exceeds the home-cooked family meal, and of course there’s the retail consumption that fuels our economy for the entire year.     

Thanksgiving has a more unified theme.  We count our blessings, feast on plenty, and give thanks.  We look to our past.  “All is safely gathered in, ere the winter storms begin,” we sing in church.  We’re no longer a rural, agrarian society but we think of our roots even as we sprinkle Kraft mini-marshmallows on our yams.  And we honor those great mythical figures, the Pilgrims.  Don’t confuse us with history; they stand for our origins and tell us who we are, or at least who we’d like to be. 

I won’t give this up.  Thankfulness – an attitude of gratitude – saves us from bitterness in a world of trouble. Being mindful of our blessings cleanses avarice, envy, and anger from our hearts. Entering a home filled with the steamy fragrance of the cooking of a holiday meal is an experience we must never lose.  Believing there are heroes in our past gives us direction for the future. I turn my head from Christmas until all this has been accomplished. 

Actually Not Bad Virgin Mary

Ingredients:

1 cup low sodium V8

¼  lime

1 tablespoon spicy seasoning mix (I use Penzy’s Southwest Seasoning)

two or three dashes Tabasco

1 small stick celery

Rub the lime wedge around the rim of an old fashioned glass.  Pour the seasoning into a shallow dish.  It will be more than you need, but you can save what you don’t use for another time.  Dip the rim of the glass into the mix to coat.  Squeeze the quarter lime into the glass and pour in V8 allowing room for ice.  Add Tabasco to taste. 

Stir and fill the glass with ice. Garnish with the celery stick. 

The spiciness of this drink makes up for the lack of salt. It also makes you sip it more slowly as you would a cocktail.  The lime juice adds a little zing the V8 lacks.  The celery gives the feeling that you’re having something special

Of course if you want to add a little vodka when no one’s looking, that’s between you and your conscience. 

Makes 1 drink.

Pasture

The Rewards of Conversion

No one is more liable to bore you than a convert.  Enlightenment sits uneasily on the throne of his conviction, and his unconscious is troubled with doubt.  Only universal acceptance of his world view can set his mind at ease. Every infidel must be brought into the light, and he may be plotting to begin with you. 

Watch out; my road to Damascus was a corridor in the Boston Medical Center, and I stand before you a man who has been born again.  In the past I scorned nutrition as a bogus science based on inaccurate research and given to frequent change.  Back at Mt. Pleasant School, Miss Sweat the nurse would ask us what we had for breakfast.  “Two fried eggs,” I’d tell her smugly, “two strips of bacon, buttered toast, and milk.”  It might or might not have been the truth, but I knew what she wanted to hear.   Now the nutritionist at cardiac rehab visibly shudders when I mention butter. 

Ah but I don’t have to hark back to my childhood for examples of the wickedness from which I am reformed.  I was the kind of guy you could go out with for a double bacon cheeseburger and a beer.  Now I’m apt to order a green salad with the dressing on the side and maybe a glass of tap water. If you dine with a person who eats like me she’d better look like a supermodel.  I’d be too polite to mention what’s probably happening to your arteries, but you’d suspect my thoughts. 

I admit my meal doesn’t taste vary good, but oh the delicious sensation of virtue!  Goodness is all the more pleasurable when it’s compared with the sins of the unconverted.  If someone’s belly overhangs his belt, the sanctified tend to notice.

Like St. Augustine, I’m a man with a past.  I contemplated a cache of frozen goose fat with the satisfaction of a miser fondling his hoard.  Augustine’s stolen apples were nothing compared with my fried Buffalo wings doused in equal parts Frank’s Hot Sauce and melted butter.  If I were to write my confessions, your mouth would water. 

Unlike the saint, I can boast about my sins and even be glad I didn’t miss out on foie gras. The god of heart attacks cares nothing for repentance. If you’re good, you go into the statistical category where the odds are better.  You can still be a loser; the numbers work for populations not for individuals.  Sinners can win. 

But the smugness of the heart-healthy eater is immediate.  For lunch today, I had spinach ravioli under a salt-free sauce enriched with tofu.  Dessert was fresh raspberries along with chunks of kiwi and apple.  What did you have?

The Lamppost Drunk

The other day I drove past a lawn ornamented with a miniature lamppost.  It was plainly visible from the road, being maybe four feet tall. Embracing it was a drunk.  You’ve seen these.  The fellow is happy in his inebriation and wears a smile.  His top hat is tilted rakishly.  His arm encircles the post and holds him up.  There’s a bottle in his other hand.

This lovable sot is intended to make you smile.  There may be those who would say drunkenness isn’t funny.  Since he’s hanging onto a lamppost, he’s in a public place, and he’s plainly too impaired to walk.  There’s a definite substance abuse problem there.

On the other hand he’s not a poor laborer whose family will starve because he squandered his wages on drink.  Only the wealthy go out in top hats and evening clothes.  Or at least they did; this fellow harks to an earlier time.  It may be a middle class send-up of the rich.  Seldom do the estates of the affluent boast such decoration. 

But you aren’t supposed to be annoyed with the boozer; he’s too jolly.  He comes from a time when drunkenness was portrayed as funny.  I think of the character Vera Charles in “Auntie Mame.” Her alcoholism was the topic of countless jokes.  Nick Charles in the Thin Man series was a heavy drinker, and his fondness for cocktails supplied much levity.  Funny drinkers are almost always happy, and their habit never seems to cause lasting misery to themselves or those around them.  Even their hangovers get a laugh.

The trouble with humorous lawn decorations is the joke goes quickly stale.  Once there was a first time you saw a jigsaw cutout of a fat woman shown from behind as she bends to pull a weed.  These became ubiquitous, and the gag became so tired their numbers have at last decreased. 

Possibly the drunk-and-lamppost totems are set out as a response to sober-sided critics who disapprove of drinking.  The fellow is defiantly upright, and smirks in the face of anyone who might frown.  I suspect the choice of an image to set outside a house to be seen by passers-by has to do with the self image of those who dwell therein. 

There’s material for a thesis here.  How did the image evolve through time, and why does it have elements of class distinction?  Scientific inquiry is needed. When the lamppost drunkard question is put to rest, researchers could go on to the Nordic gnome or the Sicilian donkey cart.  Eventually they could delve into the alarming pathology of families who display both.

Do-over

Lets for a few moments believe in reincarnation.  You’re about to be reborn and are required to drink from Lethe, the river of forgetfulness.  No one is looking, so you spit the water out and reenter the world knowing everything you knew when you left. 

The important thing about fantasy is to control it and not let it control you.  Of course, if you came into the world with adult consciousness, you’d go mad from boredom the first year. You’d get A’s in grade school, but that would drive you nuts too. 

Since I’m in charge of the fantasy, I’ll fast forward to the seventh grade.  I want to smack that bully.  I may have to take some lumps, but I know now I can endure them, and I’ll go after him every time he starts in on me.  He’ll get tired of it and torment someone else.  I’ll develop a reputation for going a little crazy when provoked. 

That dragon of a principal even has some of the teachers scared of her, but what can she really do?  If she gives me a month of detention, I’ll finally get started on War and Peace.

I know I’ve learned a lot of things that will come in handy in my new life, but there’s a danger that when I avoid my old mistakes, I’ll make new ones.  Acting like a seventy-year-old when I'm twenty-one may not endear me to young women.  I’ll talk less about myself, and be more interested in their lives, but I may end up seeming like a great uncle to whom they’ll be nice until he decides he wants to kiss them.    

My wisdom is the wisdom of the old. I’ve seen a lot of bad things happen in my life, and it has taught me to be careful – maybe too careful.  There’s no one more boring than a stuffy twenty-something.

It seems the fantasy is getting out of hand again.  The pretty girl, for whom I brought flowers and listened to her hopes and dreams, just went off with some narcissistic moron on a motorcycle.  I’m beginning to think life isn’t meant to be relived knowing what you know now.  It may just be better to swallow the waters of forgetfulness and muddle through. 

Gravenstein

Procedure

The off-white ceiling and fixtures

Of the catheterization lab

Seem like an abstract painting,

And I contemplate them

Flat on my back,

Listening to the conversation

Of doctors

As they jig a wire

Inside the arteries

Around my heart.