Not sure what it says that while browsing through music on Spotify I settled on Wagner's Overture to Parsifal as the thing that felt most right. Moody, mysterious music, with little strips of cool redemption flickering at the upper edges, like a scrap of cloth tied to a central air conditioning unit so that you can look out the window and see if it's on. (I am certain that this description would appall Richard Wagner. If he could understand it.)
In any other year at this point in November, I would be sizing up the cooking and cleaning tasks ahead, looking at recipes, making lists, getting ready to host Thanksgiving dinner for the whole family. I think we were eighteen last year, from baby Chloe to 87-year-old great-grandma.
But it's not happening in 2020, the year of the covid-19 pandemic. And while I"m trying to forge ahead and make alternative plans (and also help my daughter plan one or more Zoom birthday parties for her 30th birthday in December) I fell off that slow-moving barge of making-it-work at some point. I just need to grieve a while.
To grieve is a very non-specific verb. What do you do when you grieve? Cry? Think about the past? Worry about the future? You sit and feel sad. You tear up at all kinds of things. Yesterday my day started going south while listening to Governor Pritzker as he talked about his family during a press conference on covid precautions in Illinois. He choked up a little and my throat went there, too. Empathy. The thing that holds us all together as humans. That thing whose absence makes a wide crack where anger and cruelty grow like black mold. Something we've seen too much of lately.
I don't need to chase out the spiderwebs from the legs of the drop leaf table which in other years handles the overflow seating on Thanksgiving Day. And I don't need to put the leaves in the dining room table either, which frankly is not easy. No need to figure out which white wine to serve -- the ubiquitous and safe chardonnay we fill our glasses with as the meal begins, the sauvignon blanc that I and my older niece like, the sweet stuff brought by the youngest of the nieces. Or maybe a nice rose? Instead I'm going to roast a chicken on Thanksgiving Day, because I do not wish to eat turkey for weeks on end. I'll do it in a 400-degree oven, so there's a good chance I may still have to wave a dish towel under the smoke alarm at some point before dinner. And I may bake more of the usual pies so I can share them.
Something I read yesterday morning pointed out that Thanksgiving is the only major holiday where the traditions are shared by all Americans, regardless of religion. ( I wish I could remember where I read that so I could link to it). On this Holiday, people all across the land worry about the white meat drying out before the dark meat is cooked, and everyone has an opinion about what should and should not be on the menu. At my house there are mashed potatoes that I don't really care about but everyone else does, cranberries that almost no one eats, over-sweetened sweet potatoes, and cornbread baked in Aunt Clara's cast iron molds. (Someone will request the plastic bottle of pancake syrup.)
But that Thanksgiving is more or less cancelled this year. And the many layers of meaning I attach to it will have to be settled back into place to wait for next year. Like the cobwebs behind the chairs in the living room.
Gratitude, of course, remains, and is a proven strategy for coping day-by-day. So what am I grateful for today? Sadness shared -- that catch in the throat.
We share our mutual woes,
our mutual burdens bear,
and often for each other flows
the sympathizing tear.
"Blest be the tie that binds" stanza 3
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