Thanksgiving 2018.
It’s Thanksgiving Day in the United States so I’m reposting this from last year with some changes. It could become a tradition.
It has been celebrated as a federal holiday every year since 1863, when, during the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a national day of “Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens,” to be celebrated on the last Thursday in November.
November 25th, 1864
It was even worse than last year. I know every time my family gets together we fall into certain patterns, but that never makes it easier. This time it was even worse because just getting to my parents’ house was such a pain. I thought I’d carriagepool with my younger brother and his wife, but they went up early so that fell through. Then I thought I’d beat the traffic by setting out at dawn, which was such a great idea everybody else in Richmond had it at the same time and the horses were nose to tail, stop and trot, for miles. Finally I got there a little after ten in the morning and my older sister came out already holding a glass of blackberry wine and when she hugged me I could tell it wasn’t her first one. She asked me how things were going and then didn’t wait for an answer and ran back into the house to tell everyone I was there.
I should have known I’d be walking into an argument in the foyer, the way my family is. It’s just what it was about that threw me. My kid brother had this crazy idea for a new way to cook a turkey, leaving the feathers still on and roasting it in the coals of a fire. Well, it sounded pretty stupid to me, and I wasn’t surprised to learn that the neighbors tried the same thing last year and burned down their stable. But I didn’t want to side with my father either. So I said it had been a long trip and I needed to visit the outhouse and slipped out. Well, there was a line at the outhouse: two of my nieces, three cousins, all four of my brothers, and my sister was already in there getting rid of some of that blackberry wine. So I went back inside to see what was going on.
In the parlor my mother was putting together some kind of monstrosity with dead leaves and dried berries that she said she was going to put in the middle of the table.
“Where’s the food going to go?” I asked.
“Well, we’ll move it before we eat.”
I was going to ask why she’d bother to put it in the middle of the table if she was just going to move it again but decided against having that discussion, so instead I sat down and leafed through a broadsheet that was handy.
“The other men are organizing a game,” she said. “It’s some new sport called foot-ball. You should go and join them.”
Well, she knows I’ve never been athletic, but when I protested she got put out with me and said, “It’s your Uncle Wilkes’s idea. You know you’ve always been his favorite. You really should go and do it just to please him.”
FINE.
Well, when I came back in my sister just cackled and toasted me with another glass of blackberry wine. All my mother could say was “Don’t get any blood on the carpet,” and my older brother kept telling me to stop being a sissy and just put some salve on it. Then Aunt Gerda said pinch the back of my neck and tilt my head forward and Uncle Wilkes said no, put pressure between the eyes and lean back, and then my cousins got into it so there had to be a family brawl about that. A day later and I’m still bleeding. So much for the salve. Then Uncle Aloysius had to start in Daniel about supporting the Whigs and Elizabeth about Suffragettes, just trying to start an argument. Fortunately they didn’t rise to the bait.
Then I tried to head off another argument about who’d have to chaperone the kids’ table by volunteering, but my father cut that off.
“No, no, I want John seated here on my left. After I sent him to that fancy and very expensive school so he could waste his time studying the dramatic arts and oratory he should be well-equipped to deliver the traditional Booth family prayer of thanks.”
Traditional since last year, he means. Then my kid brother kicked me in the shins which I know was his way of saying “Don’t start anything”. I kicked him twice as hard in the shins which was my way of saying, “I wasn’t going to,” and then kicked him again to say, “Hurts, don’t it?”
All this might have been a little more bearable if my sister had let me have some of the blackberry wine.
I swear I’m going to get that Lincoln for making us do this.
They sprang up like 13-year cicadas, all over the place, on corners, under trees, and all over sidewalks. At least they were quieter than cicadas, although they could be at least as annoying, zipping up behind me as I was walking somewhere or left lying on their side blocking the path. I was checking one out–I mean considering taking one for a spin, when an older couple came up to me and asked, “How do they work?” I was tempted to be a smartass and say, “Well, you straddle it with your legs and put your feet on the pedals…” but that would be rude, so I said, “It says you have to download an app…” The woman laughed and said, sarcastically, “Well of course! You can’t do anything these days without an app,” and I was glad she was the one who got to be a smartass because she made a much better point. The Ofo bikes seemed like a fun and easy way to get around, but I’m slightly paranoid when it comes to downloading weird apps, especially ones that are theoretically free but could track where I’m going and when. Not that where I’m going is any big secret, and I do see the advantages. I’ve never forgotten the time I got lost biking around St. Petersburg, Florida, which is easy to do because the houses there all look alike, but that’s another story.
Anyway the bikes disappeared as suddenly as 13-year cicadas. It turns out 
Every year when Thanksgiving is celebrated in the United States there are certain traditions, including turkey and its own special side dish which, depending on where you are, is known as either stuffing–because it’s sometimes stuffed into and cooked with the turkey–or dressing. Regardless of what you call it it’s an essential part of the Thanksgiving meal, but varies widely from state to state. Here are the most popular stuffing, or dressing, ingredients across the United States.
I don’t fly much. This is mainly because I don’t travel much and also probably why I don’t do standup comedy because jokes about flying, airports, and airlines are pretty much a staple of standup comedy, although that may be because comedians travel a lot so maybe it’s a case of which came first: the joke about the chicken crossing the road or the evolution of reproduction by gametes? Anyway the last few times I’ve flown I was disappointed that the flight safety talk was a video and not performed by live flight attendants which used to be the standard. I remember the last time I flew and the safety talk was given by a live attendant. It was a Tuesday and the plane was mostly empty so maybe that’s why she decided to add some comedy to it, saying things like, “If the cabin should suddenly lose pressure stop screaming, let go of the person next to you, and place the oxygen mask over your face.” Or maybe she was just trying to keep her job interesting. I learned being a flight attendant can be really boring from a woman I worked with who quit her job to become a flight attendant because she thought it would be a chance to visit diverse and interesting places and instead it turned out to be a chance to visit diverse and not very interesting hotel rooms. Maybe I shouldn’t joke about it because I do feel bad whenever someone has a dream and it crashes and burns and it occurs to me that “crashes and burns” may not be the best way to describe the end of a flight attendant’s career. I should probably save that one for the guy I worked with who quit his job as a professional librarian to become a professional truck driver because he thought it would give him time to do a lot of reading and was surprised that instead it gave him time to do a lot of truck driving, so he went back to his old job even though he didn’t have any more time for reading while he was librarianing, but that’s another story.
Orion is rising west by southwest in the mornings now. It’s the second constellation I learned to identify after the Big Dipper, Ursa Major. It took some time before I could find the Big Dipper, before I even understood what constellations were. I was five when I overheard an older kid, some sunny summer day, say that he was going to look for the Big Dipper that night. I didn’t even know what a dipper was so I asked my mother and she took me out that night and pointed up at the stars. “There’s the spoon,” she said, “and there’s the handle.” I’m sure she explained that a constellation is a picture made up by connecting the stars like dots but I missed that part and thought, what is she talking about? All I see are stars. And I was terrible at connect-the-dots puzzles anyway. I’d get bored somewhere around three and skip ahead to nine so no matter what the picture was supposed to be it always looked like an amoeba, but that’s another story.
For a long time every time I looked at Orion I wondered why ancient astronomers—the constellation was named by the Greeks—had called it that. Why Orion? Almost from the time I could read I was fascinated by Greek and Roman mythology—any mythology, really, but Greek and Roman was the most available—and Orion always seemed like a pretty obscure figure. He doesn’t play a major role in any big myths; in fact Orion seems to have long since been constellated by the time Jason goes looking for the golden fleece, not to mention the fall of Troy and Odysseus’s epic voyage. Why does Orion get such a prominent place in the sky, rising in the mornings at the start of winter in the northern hemisphere, gradually moving to the evenings as Earth approaches perihelion? Who was Orion, anyway, besides a hunter?