Skip to main content

Thanksgiving 2025

 This Thanksgiving I didn't go home. My grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles are dead and even my cousins are starting to fall. My brother married a nice lady who came equipped with three children. They are grown up and married now, and one has children. She is afraid that we will touch them. She makes sure that they have blueberries every day. I can do without all that. The others have no children. 



There haven't been many Thanksgivings where I spent the day by myself. I usually go home and if I don't go home I have Friendsgiving.



This year I worked on Thanksgiving Day. I had a short shift and went home to my dinner. I had turkey breast, green beans, beets and a buttered croissant. It was good. 



Before that I had a walk with one of my neighbors, who was similarly sitting out the holiday. Her Thanksgiving meal was going to be Manwich straight out of the can over Texas Toast. She was slurping her words as she talked about it. She was really looking forward to her Manwich, then a movie and a nap. We parted ways as the setting sun turned the sky red and I went inside.



As I was walking I felt this surge of light within me, a completely un-hoped-for incandescent happiness. It was a beautiful, clear day, cool but not cold, and breezy. I had had a really good shift, a walk in the sun and a good meal. I had had chats with online friends who were also sitting out the holidays. 



I concentrated on that feeling of happiness. It was like a gift from the universe. I had expected to be sad today but I was not sad at all. I felt what Camus referred to to that eternal spring within himself.



I had told my mother long ago that I would spend the holidays in Las Vegas but it seems now that I will not have to do that. I can have a walk with neighbors, a simple meal, online chats and a nap. Perhaps next year I will have Manwich over Texas Toast.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

First Post

Hello, I'm Jan and this is my blog. I plan to post essays on things that come to mind. I don't think I'll write a lifestyle blog. It's just going to be about things I think about.  Here goes. 
Post a Comment
Read more

My Friend Sam

 I helped clean out my friend Sam's apartment yesterday. To say that the cleaning was profoundly sad is to overstate nearly everything. The apartment was a terrible mess. The grief that I felt for Sam was muted by the appalling mess in the apartment. Our Man just never threw away anything, including the hairs that he shed. We found enough to make a wig. Sam was from Eastern Kentucky. We are taught to not wish for much in Kentucky. Don't aim high; aim low so that you can at least hit the ground. Nobody says that, but that's the motto.  Sam was gay. He had to leave Eastern Kentucky because of that. He was nearly beaten to death on a couple of occasions by law enforcement. I pretty sure that he sustained brain damage from the beatings. He was a manager at a restaurant in North Carolina. I never got the story of how he got there or why he left; Sam was a stoner. Time, if he wasn't going to work, wasn't a consideration for him. Sam told one of our friends that the 35 yea...
Post a Comment
Read more

My Cousin Mareta

  My Cousin Mareta My cousin Mareta died of COVID on September 12th, 2021, a year and a half into the pandemic. She vowed that there was no such thing as COVID; she’d prove there was no such thing as COVID. She was on a vent 28 days, improved a bit toward the end, then died.  She was the perfect Livingston Countian: She never had a job, lived her life in a two mile radius of her childhood home, living completely for her family and community, being a volunteer, church worker and caregiver. She married the boy she began dating in her sophormore year in high school, and, by all accounts, it was a very happy marriage. I have no doubt that, if she had lived, they would have grown old together and died together. I don’t think that they ever dated anyone else.  She was born a hospital, in Salem, Kentucky, but thereafter, unless she went to Paducah for her groceries or to Florida on vacation, and for her final trip in life to the ICU, she spent her life in Hampton, Kentucky. Her ...
Post a Comment
Read more