Thanksgivings
(Nov. 21, 2010) Last night was the fourth annual Pre-Thanksgiving Thanksgiving. I’m a sucker for traditions, especially the symbolic ones, and this has become something of a moment to take our collective pulse as we progress through this liminality before real adulthood. I don’t know if I can really call it my fourth. My first was actually just a Thanksgiving. I was in Paris, away from my family on the holiday for the first time, and insisted my friends there gather to observe. Bless that saintly woman who found us the only turkey in France. The next year, back in Chicago, we were all heading home, but dammit I was going to learn to cook a turkey and got everyone together for a surprisingly complete meal the weekend before. I love my big extended family Thanksgivings. I insist upon them. But in Connecticut a few days later, I couldn’t help but think that the meal I’d shared with that group of friends, my ad hoc family most of the year, maybe had started to mean a little more. Last year, our dinner was absorbed into that of some friends who’d moved down to the same neighborhood as us after graduation. One of them had started their Pre-Thanksgiving to compete, culinarily, with our parents two years before. (We may, at least here, be winning that race already.) The size of the guest list had continued to grow. It was a chance to catch up with former classmates I’d not seen in few months, others who’d moved now back visiting. The meal was a thread of continuity holding us together through some big changes. I was stuck last night in the tension between continuity and change; excited to see friends returning, but also conscious of who wasn’t there, how many of us had been drawn in different directions over the last year. Geographically and otherwise. Maybe it was having to say goodbye forever now to another relocating friend at the end of the night. This year there was a note of melancholy in the stuffing. But after this many versions of Pre-Thanksgiving, I also know that wherever I find myself next year, it can come with me - taking a moment, before the chaos of family and home, to celebrate whatever community I’ve found.
