I Must Be Living Right

I must be living right.

I was outside yesterday, blowing the drifts of leaves that had accumulated on our end of the cul-de-sac off the street when my neighbor walks up with a box of Partagas cigars. I had actually just finished a cigar, so there was a certain amount of serendipity to his arrival. To add icing on the cake, so to speak, I reminded him that I'd just had a birthday the day before. The timing of it all seemed to make him smile even harder as he handed me that beautiful yellow box.

Turkey, wine and talk filled the rest of the day. Everyone at the table seemed to be very upset about the breach of security at the White House earlier in the week, but other than that, we successfully stuck to good old homegrown gossip and personal milestones for the rest of the day. In the interests of maintaining the holiday spirit for another day or so, I will save all comments about the reality show gate crashers who waltzed into the state dinner at the White House on Tuesday night for another day.

Unless something big happens, I think I'm going to stay off the internet for a day or two and see what else is happening in the world. Some of my neighbors have been busy putting up Christmas decorations all week, as if they have been looking forward to escaping from the economy and politics and war for a little while.

The thanks has been given.

The bread has been broken.

And in a little while, when it warms up, I will light one of these cigars.

Let the season of good cheer and good tidings begin.

A New Kind Of Hope

When I visited my relatives in the D.C. (Deep Country) areas of South Carolina, one thing I always noticed when I was younger was that in practically every shotgun hovel, cinder block house, and mobile home we went to, they all had three things in common:

A picture of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Jesus Christ (the long haired white version).


Hope and liberation.


So last week, Thanksgiving found me back in the D.C., back in the heart of the same territory my relatives have inhabited for generations. The contingent that had migrated to New York and Philadelphia and the real D.C. had descended upon my aunt’s house, as usual, to break bread with one another and give thanks with their family.

It is amazing what urban living could do to your northern kin folk, people who shared the same DNA you had, who grew up picking cotton and cropping tobacco in the same fields with your parents when they were all children. The city folks seemed to have become more alert, more aware, with sharpened reflexes and keener eyes.

This year, though, everybody, southerners and northerners alike, seemed to radiate the same dialed in vibe, the same level of hyperkinetic energy just under the skin. It was as if no one could wait to express how excited they were that Barack Obama had become the next president.

The regular greetings - “hey, how you doing? Everybody doing okay? You look like you haven’t been missing any meals” – were truncated, with a big pause after “hey, how you doing?” that led right into “I just feel so good”.

A distant aunt from New York, sixty something years young, upright and spry in an athletic outfit, was circulating among us, giving each of us a hug and a calendar. “These are all over Brooklyn.” she said as she handed me and the gaggle of cousins around me calendars with a fuzzy picture of Barack, Michelle, Malia and Sasha Obama superimposed over the presidential seal.

I recounted the hope and liberation story to my brother later as we traveled to another house full of relatives we hadn’t seen in a year. “You know,” I said to him as we motored along a network of impossibly dark country roads, “I guess all those Kennedy pictures will be coming down soon. Gonna have to make room for a new kind of hope.”

Why Thanksgiving Is The Real Christmas

Barack Obama distributes food to the needy at St. Columbanus Parrish

There is something about Christmas, especially if it comes on a Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday, that is a bit of a downer. The entire day reaches its climax about 10 am, when all of the gifts have been opened, and the commercial glow has begun to fade, until nothing is left but scraps of wrapping paper lying about amid the stacks of new belongings. Christmas dinner is often joyous, but strained, as if its participants can already feel those credit card bills in the mail, or wonder how they are going to juggle the bills they didn’t pay to create that temporary commercial glow earlier in the day.

If Christmas is on a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday, a lot of people are going back to work the next day. If it's on a Friday, they are slipping into a bit of a funk – the same people who just finished stacking up their new belongings now want to go out and buy even more stuff, because its…well, because everybody knows stuff is cheaper after Christmas.

In the last ten years or so, as I focused less on the material things in life and more on the experiences I could have, I started to notice more clearly the mixed messages the Christmas holiday czars were sending as they attempted to fuse religion, family tradition, and materialism.

Thanksgiving, by contrast, is unambiguous. It is all about the family. And it is always on a Thursday, which means that a lot of non-retail related workplaces have given up trying to schedule any real work during this time, making this America’s only official four day holiday period.

The phrase “giving thanks” seems to actually mean something when people say it at Thanksgiving. For a lot of us, it is a beginning of that end-of-the-year contemplation, where we go through informal self assessments as to what we’ve accomplished, and what remains undone. The focus of the day is on food, shared with people you are related to by blood or people to whom you’ve chosen to be related. No one is obligated to bring anything other than a dish, an empty stomach, and a sense of goodwill.

We catch up; we reminisce; we watch football; we tell tall tales. We play games; we take pictures; we exchange email addresses. We celebrate new beginnings, and cherish the memories of those who are no longer with us.

I would swap this Thanksgiving spirit...

Barack Obama entertains grade school children at St. Columbanus Parrish

...in a minute for the one I feel at Christmas.