24 November 04
Thanksgiving
We do not do Thanksgiving Dinner. People around me ask, jokingly yet accusingly, whether I’m not thankful. Yes, I say, every day, but I’m a vegetarian, and it’s all about turkey, and I just don’t understand what connection there is between being thankful and stuffing my face over the course of hours at the expense of my mother’s back and tranquility and overall mental health, which is how I recall this from the time when we DID do Thanksgiving Dinner, in Spain, when nobody else was, a little island of American tradition where most of the people at the table were more English than American, a tradition we then repeated a month later, only this time with presents.
Once we were invited by some friends—he was in the US Air Force—to Thanksgiving Dinner at the Base southeast of Madrid. (This was the Torrejn Air Force Base, but it was just called “The Base” by all non-base English speakers, a place which, during the height of the Cold War which this was, would be the launching point for an airborne nuclear attack in the European theatre, which we never thought about at all being only nine or ten. To us the Base was a place where you could get American candy and American comics and where there were lots and lots of people who never emerged at all, never saw Spain, never learned even a word of Spanish, carried on their own little version of military life that would have been identical in Germany, or Japan, or the Philippines but which always included lots of liquor. There were exceptions, such as the friends who had invited us. They seemed very, very rare.
What struck me about this dinner at the Base was how formulaic it was. Our Thanksgiving dinners at home were similar—similar ingredients—but were special, probably because we were the only family within three miles to have the oven on at 5:00 am; I enjoyed making the crosses on the stems of the brussels sprouts like some minor benediction, waiting for the inevitable o’clock when my mother would cut herself badly with one knife or another. (Blood everywhere. Every time.) At the Base, by contrast, there were literally hundreds of people getting the same mashed potatoes, the same turkey, the same gravy—the uniformity, the sheer number of slices of turkey, made it so much less and at the same time so much more. It was excess, my first real inkling of it on this scale. The food was good. It was just that there was so MUCH of it.
The past few days I’ve been pondering on the emptiness of this culture. The paradoxes abound: there’s way too much of everything, of food, of STUFF. Obesity is an epidemic linked to poverty, of all things; antidepressants are now the number one class of drug prescribed in the U.S. When will we say, as a culture, enough? Enough stuff? Enough of this emptiness? We have so much now, can’t we just be thankful for THIS? Can’t we share? Can’t we just be?
So I will get up tomorrow morning and be grateful for the white-crowned and golden-crowned sparrows that sing and scratch at our back door, for the rock wren hiding in the bee boxes, for the color of the dawn, for the mist that glides over the levee, for my health, for my friends, for my family, for my love. Then I will go and BE in this instead of eating for hours followed by slouching comatose in a chair watching a game of American football.
And on Friday, I will not shop till I drop. It’s Buy Nothing Day. You’re invited.
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Not only will I buy nothing on Friday, I may even sell stuff. Though not to you, apparently. ;-)
The image of your mother’s “blood everywhere” in the kitchen pricks some memory of mine, though I’m not sure whose blood flowed. And it raises the question: Can vegetarians lick their own wounds? Each other’s?
Thankfully, Jarrett
I’m a solitary, and in such noisy times as a family reunion, I just need the security of a nice comfy cell.
Thanks, though, for this lovely meditation.
I can inderstand your view of Thanksgiving from outside the States. Living here in Japan and going to an international school the dominant Americans insisted that the school close down for the Thanksgiving holidays, though the holiday had absolutely no meaning to 90% of the students. My Canadian friends always complained that the school did not celebrate their Thanksgiving (how many Americans are even aware that Canada has its own Thanksgiving? Or Japan, too… “Harvest Day”).
I also understand about the image of “the Base”. There were seven bases around Tokyo when I was a boy (reduced to five now) and whenever my school would visit one of them for our soccer matches (was always weird playing soccier with people who couldn’t care less about the game) it was like alighting on alien soil. The whole landscape was different… manicured lawns that seemed to spread out to forever (in a land with a premium on available space), the houses seemed to have been transported out of American movies, and the food in the PX was like astronaut fare (tubes of ketchup and butter, aerosol cans of whip cream, shrink wrapped chicken, french fries served from a conveyor belt… all weird at that time, though Japan adopted it all wholeheartedly in the years to come). And like the army brats you knew, few of them ever ventured out of the compound, none that I knew had ever made a Japanese friend, and most of them would pick at Japanese food I brought as bag lunch with me to the games and would offer to them to try as if it was the Japanese culture that didn’t belong here.
Needless to say I had few experiences that might have reinforced some respect for them and what I did see strongly colored my view of America until I actually went back to live there as an adult, and I saw lots of other kinds of people.
I find it delightfully appropriate that you would declare my birthday Buy Nothing Day. If only the whole world would follow suit.