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| Articles: Thanksgiving without a Turkey |
Posted by
Comedian on Saturday, November 30, 2002 - 12:05 PM PST
Time changes everything. Fifty years ago; we have pictures of our fathers and mothers staying at home and baking turkeys and letting pies cool on the window sill; mom at home and dad on the job. Maybe they had a TV if they were privileg'd, with maybe two or three channels that came in on the rabbit ears. The rest of them sat around the radio and listened to Jack Benny and thanksgiving specials. But time changes everything. And families have changed.
I live in a state with a 60% divorce rate. It makes all the holidays interesting, to say the least. My friends who still live at home and learned to deal with the screaming no longer desire gifts, or food, or togetherness. They pushed away and back, and hate the holidays now. They all have a favored parent to spend the holidays with, but out of guilt or a feeling of fairness they spend it with one they favor less. It seems odd to balance family relations on a single day of the year; and it hurts them in ways that show only subtlely now, and will probably show more the older they get.
My youth and family fell away from me in the place I live now; and things have gone on, rather than the world stopping for just a moment, as sometimes people require to cope. The world kept moving.
The Starbuck's on the corner is unusually crowded on Thanksgiving morning, californians and locals cram in the door getting Mochas and Lattes and frappuchinos in model 98'-02' cars. A big black sheep dog sits by the door, big tongue lolling out while the kids stoop to pet him. The high ceiling has smoked glass lamps at the top of the high, red wood roof. I remember walking by from the pool hall on the way home when we had left elementary school, and passing by the abandoned gas station that was the lot the Starbuck's has come to be on. Allan is the one mechanic in town, and had moved when he finally couldn't afford the rent or to keep the place. The old Indian had moved in a little less than a year later, putting up expensively priced fur rugs on wooden rafters under the roof where the gas pumps had been. I saw him once, coming home from school after we had poured 5 dollars in silver and copper change into the jukebox to give the poor, drunk patrons of the pool hall an afternoon of "Disco Nights"... He was sitting in the shop, and through the grease-gray streaked windows you could see him with the can of skoal on the counter looking through the pages of Guns N' Ammo. THe pool hall and the Indian are gone.. And I feel responsible, somehow, for them going. When I left, so did they..
The irony was that the pool hall became a disco Karaoke hall.
Sitting in a car for no particular reason, and waiting again. The door is open, to get the final smells of pine and chicken and beer from the downtown area.. The music of the ice cream van fades, and just above the din of the highway and the roads from the barrio to the south the gentle notes of the old romance song come to my ears. I sing along for a few moments before losing the song back to the constant hum of the city, slowed only slightly by the city shutting down for the evening for everyone to go home. A few chicano children run past in the twilight, back from the park and heading home. They are laughing and skipping in winter coats too large for them, legs impossibly skinny and jutting out like pencils from a massive solid body wrapped in thick layers of water-repelling cloth. I wonder if they're celebrating this day, this ideal. I wonder if they have turkey at home, as they skip into a vacant lot with an overturned shopping cart and broken glass bottles and bent street sign.
Casinos are always open, I think back to the christmas where I spent an evening in the small cafe nestled between the buffet and Chinese bistro. A few elderly couples and families in from god knows where; an Hindi family in one booth and a small group of trourist Kiwis at a table and another of Greek students. But this is Thanksgiving. A year later, and here I am again. The line at the buffet is atrocious and the menu is worse, 6 different ways of cutting turkey and they can turn it into a paragraph of words written in a day-glow highlighter against a black fiberglass board. Quitting that line we head to the multinational cafe and have a basic meal. It's empty, the waitress doesn't want to be there and the busboy hasn't realized yet that his tips for the night aren't going to be much.
Two CSI episodes and a special on Elvis on the tube, and I'm out for the night. I wake up with a sore neck and a cat hair down my throat.
Macy's on the day after Thanksgiving is suicide; children fall off their parents by around noon; bored ones begin playing games and jump out at you screaming from around corners and from udner tables. The sales clerks are rushed, pushing Kermit the Frog dolls and praying for lunch. And praying to find parking spaces when they come back from lunch. They opened at 6 a.m., to push the Christmas earlybirds. Items to the first 100 customers, and purchase deals and contests.
And on my way back to the hill, past a car wreck where I get to peruse the numerous bumper stickers of a white wiccan lesbian snowboarder, I see the lake. It hasn't changed from my youth. The mountains have a little bit of snow on them, and the afternoon sun plays the shadows of the trees along the road, cascading light running through the branches like fingers through rich brown and black hair.
I'm tired. I've made my choices and run with them for as far as I have. I look back and wonder if Frost and Housman had the same regrets looking back on their lives. Sometimes I wonder. My movements are beginning to falter. Foundation's cracking. I want something. I was taught that with power and wealth the world is small, and appetites become insatiable; to the poor, the world is large and unconquerable, a thing of wonder and impalpability.
Times are changing again, and I can barely keep up.
"Ay, ay, ay, ay, cantas y no llores.. Porque cantando si alegra cielito lindo los corazones..."
Maybe I shouldn't keep up.
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| Thanksgiving without a Turkey | Login/Create an account | 16 Comments |
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Thanksgiving with 2 Turkeys
by MorteAscendo (corpsmanwix@aol.com)
on Nov 30, 2002 - 06:21 PM
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I'm over 5,000 miles away from my family, and i still love the holidays. Its just how you look at it. To each there own.
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The More Things Change...
by Monolycus on Nov 30, 2002 - 06:30 PM
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Sadly, during those highly romanticised days of yesteryear, there were still hyper-aware beings that were waxing nostalgic for something earlier... something more primary... something, well, pure. In that moment when you are wiping the crass commercialism off the soles of your shoes and fanning the air to drive off the stink of corporate synergy, it is easy for the Aware to note that they are living against a cardboard backdrop. The flimsy façade emulates the way we imagine things should be and never are.
As early as fifty years ago it was the same. That crackling, black and white television and sonorous radio were squawking incessantly about imaginary people and how much they truly love one another. How their problems could all be neatly wrapped up inside the half an hour each week that they appeared to everyone. Holidays were especially rich times for these familiar phantoms... and every Christmas would find them miraculously delivered at the final moment from whatever threatened to intrude upon their bliss. Nowadays, we do not have to wait for a weekly visit... one does not even have to touch a button for these benevolent caricatures to intrude into our lives. They are around us every minute of every day reminding of us the way things are SUPPOSED to be.
Before the products of the advertising industry appeared to show us how we failed to measure up during the holidays, life must have been much richer and more genuine, yes? People just accepted things as they were instead of how things should be, didn't they? Before every billboard we passed showed us the way, we only had to go to church to find our unattainable ideals. We could let our friends the prophets tell us how we failed to measure up to the way we ought to be. Every Christian girl could kick herself for not being as virtuous as the Madonna... every Muslim boy could torture himself for having impure thoughts... every Jew, well, they have families to insure that they have something to feel guilty over. Maybe we should look to a time before the God of Abraham came along to make us feel badly. Surely, those must have been the good old days! Only Hercules or the Buddha to demonstrate to us the kinds of lives we would lead and the relationships we would be having if we could only be as perfect as they. Hmm.
Yes, things are artificial. Yes, artificially sweet holidays and sentiments have been determined to cause cancer in laboratory cultures. But this is nothing new. People have always imagined that the world should be things that it is not, nor can ever be. Beyond the constructions of cultural expectations lie what actually IS... and rather than letting the dim curtain of what SHOULD BE distort our view and make us feel badly about ourselves, perhaps we should take a moment to chase away those little imps of artificiality that keep whispering in our ears... they are keeping us from enjoying what we actually have.
~Monolycus
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Re: Thanksgiving without a Turkey
by Merry_Widow on Dec 01, 2002 - 02:05 AM
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I didn't have my thanksgiving turkey. He was up in Bakersfield with his family. So I nibbled on roast beef instead. Almost as good.
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Re: Thanksgiving without a Turkey
by Dolorosa (SixOfSwords@IU.zzn.com)
on Dec 02, 2002 - 10:16 AM
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That was such a living and visually-potent description of reality it was eerie.
I kinda' forgot about holidays myself, so I have to get used to 'em again...
You can come to my place for any holiday man...we don't have too much, but we're a warm and generous tribe, if not a bit weird.
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