We Gather Together in Thanksgiving

It's the last day gratitude still has a fighting chance

Thanksgiving is the last best holiday. Commerce hasn’t wounded it, selfishness has no place at its table. It’s just a day of remembering how lucky we are.

We don’t take Thanksgiving for granted. At least we try not to. The fortunate among us spend Thanksgiving with people we love and who love us. That’s the essence of the day, stripped of its trimmings. For one day, mindfulness comes naturally.

I spent one Thanksgiving alone, in a hotel room in Anchorage, AK, where I was covering the old Great Alaska Shootout for the dearly departed Dallas Times Herald. Dallas was hosting the Final Four that year, 1986. My job was to cover the proverbial Road to Dallas, hence I was in Alaska interviewing Rollie Massimino, whose Villanova team had won it all the previous year, and Jerry Tarkanian, the forever unrepentant coach at UNLV.

For Thanksgiving dinner, I had reindeer sausage and spam nachos and watched the sun slide behind the Chugach Mountains at 2 in the afternoon. I’ve never felt more lonely, before or since. Or more appreciative of a day that should be the least lonely of the year.

The holiday is unabashedly American, born on our shores, midwifed by people who risked their lives for an idea, suffered mightily for it, and emerged better for their struggles. They had faith. They were grateful.

Gratitude is a healing emotion. Being aware of your good fortune is almost as important as sharing it. I’ve noted this in This Space:

Part of our current divide is because we don’t take the time to be grateful. We are privileged in a way no people on Earth have ever been. We have freedoms that are still the envy of the world.

We have it good. We don’t often act like it.

Maybe we could ponder that for a day. Thanksgiving Day. The one day a year that gratitude has a fighting chance.

On days like this, I pull from boxes in the basement the crinkled Polaroids of Thanksgivings past. I am a professional melancholist, self-trained in the art of feeling happy while feeling sad.

So many people in the pictures now live in memory. My parents, my wife’s mom, all our aunts and uncles and grandparents. Fixtures at the big, long table, moved on. I’d like to think I never took their presences for granted or assumed their chairs at the table would always be occupied. But I don’t know.

Now, I know only that I remember them and tomorrow I’ll honor their memories with my gratitude for the day. Thanksgiving Day. Let’s hold it tight and be mindful of who we are to one another. As a family and a nation.