The Soul of Thanksgiving

“For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul? “ Mark 8:35-36

The year was 1863. Abraham Lincoln was President. Strife ruled. The nation was at war with itself. The landscape by any visionary’s account was bleak and dreary. The nation seemed to have lost its bearings and its very soul. Being thankful under these conditions was seemingly impossible. The nation urgently needed to mend its fraying fabric.

Under these dire conditions Lincoln issued a proclamation establishing the last Thursday in November as a national holiday. His intent was to coalesce a nation of diverse cultures and individuals into a cohesive whole by remembering the origin of its birth. This year Americans will celebrate the 151st anniversary of Thanksgiving.

In 1620 pilgrims departed from Defts-Haven, searching for a new land with an ephemeral idea of freedom. They had no idea what they would face in the quest. As if the hardships of the voyage were not enough to deter them, what they saw at landfall must have made them question their sanity altogether.

There, looming before them in the harsh winter stood a land with a weather-beaten face. It appeared to them a country full of woods and thickets, a place full of multitudes of untamed beasts and wild men. It had an ominous and savage hew. Such is the nature of the unknown…wild, fearful but full of promise.

It was up to these pilgrims to carve out their dreams and visions. They neither expected nor received the benefits of ease in the process. For having left their homes, having said goodbye to their families and friends, they said goodbye to the old life and searched for a better home.

We who read this today are benefitting from the sacrifices of these visionaries. We can ask ourselves these questions: Under what tyranny would we now be living if not for the perseverance of these intrepid travelers? How would our destiny have unfolded? Fortunately, we have the answers. Living in America is a blessing of untold and incalculable dimensions. Read the news if you don’t believe this!

Yesterday we sat in a Methodist Church in the small town of my youth. We gathered there to say a final goodbye to a family member. My nephew, Preston, recalled the influence she had upon his life. He synthesized it based on his annual visits for Thanksgiving. He recalled pulling into the driveway of his grandmother’s home. The first thing he saw was her face in the kitchen window, welcoming him with a smile.

The soul of an American Thanksgiving has a face. It’s seen in the Rockwell-blended faces of families, merged together into a national tapestry. Each face represents a precious memory, of a home and a secure place where families can thrive.

The blessings of national unity are too broad to enumerate. But the collective voice of Thanksgiving blends them together at every table where food is served, laughter is heard and love is shared. The soul of being American is once again revived on this memorable day.

Today, the world is a dangerous place. It’s fractious, filled with secular pursuits, religious divisions and seethes with national rivalries. Our country has its own fractured diversity, revealed by recent events in Missouri that have prompted protests nationwide.

Yet in spite of this, America continues to stand, strong in the collective unity under which it was founded…established by a beneficent God for the purpose of freedom. A continuous remembrance of this fact is what Thanksgiving is all about.

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Today here began bleak and dreary, consequences of the passing storms. In the front yard a squirrel sat on its hind quarters, gnawing on acorns. It seemed to smile as it feasted on the prodigious crop furnished by the oak trees.

America has endured many storms. It will weather more. But, like the squirrel, we can take comfort in the fact that a gracious Almighty God desires to furnish us with untold blessings. Our collective soul will continue to flourish as long as we remember the Source of these blessings.

Thank you, Abraham Lincoln, for the gift of this holiday. Thank you, God, for blessing the soul of America. Happy Thanksgiving to you and your family.

Bud Hearn
November 26, 2014


Sketch courtesy of Leslie Hearn

The Kitchen Insurrection

Women are mad. They’ve revolted. Legions of liberated feminists are abandoning kitchens across the land. Men are starving.

Husbands stagger in, exhausted, ravenous with hunger. “Honey, I’m home. What’s for dinner?”

A voice answers, “Whatever you’re fixing. It’s girls’ night out.” A mournful wail echoes, “What about me?” Silence. Men know. Takeout again.

Women are fed up with cooking. Men, get a grip. It’s not fair, but factual. They’re sick of asking, “What do you want for dinner?” Always hearing the same soppy reply, “Whatever you want, Sweetie.” Women murder for less. Kitchens and cupboards are now as vacuous as men’s bellies and brains. The famine is finally hitting home.

Men ask, why? Simple. Women have spent their finest hours in kitchens, toiling like slaves in sweatshops. Kitchens are where men breeze in, eat and exit. “Thanks, Hon, real good, gotta go now.” Women sit alone at the table, smoldering, staring at the disaster left behind.

Face it. Men aren’t cut out for kitchens. Take cooking, for example. Can men read recipes longer than three words? No. They throw whatever’s handy into the mix, boil it or fry it. Result? More Pepto! Neither can men locate things in the pantry. They stare right at it, and yell, “Honey, you’re out of mayo.” Note the blame: ‘you,’ not ‘we.’

A man’s idea of a kitchen is his grill, an unsightly outside fire pit. It’s a blackened steel drum, rusted and coated with fat and gunk from past fires. The Health Department would declare it a bacillus-breeding contagion. It’s where hapless animals have offered their flesh as backyard-sacrifices, charred, polluting the neighborhood with smoke.

An episode occurred once when my wife was out of town. She called, asking what I’d done for dinner. I answer, “Why, what men have done from time immemorial. I lit a fire, tossed on it a slab of red meat and opened a beer.”

She recoiled in horror, “No salad?” Women have strange ideas of balanced meals. Everyone knows meat and beer are nutritionally perfect.

Men make good use of nature when cooking. Young boys cut down entire trees for fires. Big fires are good. They trim branches and whittle the ends sharp. They thrust the branch through the middle of a wiener, or marshmallow, torching both like brilliant flambeaus and eating the charred residue. Boys can go in the strength of that food forty days and forty nights.

Another reason women have left the kitchen is clean-up duty. Personally, I never minded cleaning up. Except things never really got clean. My wife would inspect the job, usually resulting in numerous re-washes. Cleanliness, you know, is a relative term; men and women interpret it differently.

Creek-bank campouts provide adequate opportunity in the art of cooking. Cooked over open flames, fried fish, potatoes, bacon and eggs were tasty staples. Grease was the imperative ingredient. Hot grease is like gas, mixes great with fire. Boys love fires. With paper towels they wipe the pans ‘clean,’ ready for the next meal. Somehow boys survive. They’re indestructible. They can drink Drano for breakfast.

Would you like to see a woman explode? Let a man collate her cookware in his idea of an orderly arrangement. Washing cats is safer. All men need is one large walk-in closet where everything can be tossed. Perfect male order. A sick thought.

Setting the table drives women berserk. For men, forks, spoons and knives are grouped for convenience, not convention, depending on whether they were right or left-handed. Logical, right? And place mats? Oh, don’t bother. Stacks of table clutter abound… newspapers, coupon inserts and magazines. Napkins? Who needs ‘em. Paper towels are cheap.

Of course there’s more. Try ‘fear of dishwasher.’ Nothing good can come from men learning to operate such equipment. And don’t even mention cleaning kitchen counters. Germs? No way. What’s out of sight is out of mind. The list is inexhaustible.

And so are men’s appetites. Except things are different now. The Kitchen Rebellion has gained traction. She’s out, we’re in. What can be done? Watch Paula, Rachel or Emeril on TV? Not happening.

As for me, I’m posting a “Cook Wanted” ad at Waffle House. And guess what? Grease is making a comeback. It has longer shelf life than kale. And much more tasty.


Bud Hearn
November 14, 2014

Ebola…Coming soon to a Place near You

The market’s up. Unemployment is down. Banks are lending. Oil is cheap. The party’s getting better. But then you hear a disturbance outside. Suddenly, Wham! The door explodes. And there it stands, looking straight at you: Ebola, grinning like death. The music stops.

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Another viral intruder has invaded our borders, revealing the underbelly of indecision on the issue of illegal immigration. Too late for isolation and quarantine. The enemy is now among us.

Yes, it’s been a frightening year, 2014. The world’s flirting with disaster. The Russians and the Chinese are squeezing us like a fat piece of fried bologna layered between slices of white bread. Burkas and keffiyehs are now fashion statements. Confusion reigns. The only thing we can really count on is Jimmy Carter’s immortality.

The Ebola contagion creeps through the cracks of our porous shores. It rides on the breath of Sierra Leone refugees. It oozes from the lips of Liberian escapees. Nobody’s safe. French kissing is deadly.

Newscasts report people wailing and fleeing their homes, running wildly into the streets in mass hysteria. Hyperbole is a media extravaganza. Even the ACLU, not to be outdone, is digging up litigants for a class action law suit against the Washington Management Team. After all, quarantine in Ebola tent colonies in the parking lots of Walmart is cruel and unusual punishment. Not to mention shopping there.

There is a bright side. The Ebola epidemic, unlike Duck Dynasty, has so far only affected a few. New Jersey has been quick to respond. They’ve given up waiting on the CDC to remove its head from the proverbial bureaucratic morass.

New Jersey is a magnet for disasters ever since Tony Soprano arrived, RIP. God has been trying for years without success to reduce Atlantic City to the ocean floor. Sandy didn’t do the job. Trump tried, but soon abandoned his avaricious icon and slinked back to Manhattan. Now Ebola is taking a shot at it. It may parallel Bruce Springsteen’s music for nuclear fallout.

New Jersey’s problems began with the Grover’s Mill township incident on Halloween, October 30, 1938. Remember when the Martians landed their spaceship there? Orson Welles narrated the invasion live on the radio…War of the Worlds. Some aliens intermarried and still reside there. Prominent among them are the New Jersey Housewives. Most have been banished and live on Miami Beach. The remaining Martians fled, unable to perfect the phonetic Jersey nasal dialect.

Gov. Chris wasted no time in doling out confinements for persons suspected of being contaminated. Unfortunately, the size of the dilemma was of greater girth than the Governor. Most everyone in the state is suspected of being toxic to some degree. It offers a clue as to why nobody admits being from Newark.

Some pestilences leave stigmas. Ebola is fast surpassing measles for social isolation. Who hasn’t had measles? Remember the ridicule of classmates when, at about age twelve, you showed up with red bumps on your face? Ostracism from PE class lives in infamy to this day.

Isolation follows young children around like a bad odor. After measles, the mumps attack. Mumps, as you know, can cause sterility among males. The horror of such a stigma is the leading cause of ADHD in young boys.

Schools, like politics, breed germs. The contagion of Pediculushumanuscapitis, commonly known as head lice, is a disgusting malady. Stabbing the crawly creatures with sharp toothpicks is neither fun nor an effective remedy. Shampoo laced with kerosene does the job efficiently. Social suspicion lingers long after the quarantine is lifted.

While poison ivy is not terminal, it ranks right up there with athlete’s foot for public itching and social ostracism. Walking around with a plaster of calamine lotion does little to elevate one’s standing in the community.

My brother coveted his athlete’s foot. His pastime was to put a sock between his toes and rub it viciously back and forth until his toes became flames of fire. His grin of relief remains a fungus on the family name.

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Humor aside, Ebola, like any terminal disease, is not a laughing matter. Hope for cure abides. Longfellow wrote: “…Defeat may be victory in disguise. The lowest ebb is the turn of the tide.”

Ebola is now among us…let’s hope this week’s election returns won’t portend another landing of the Martians!

Bud Hearn
November 7, 2014