Thanksgiving…More Than Just a Meal

Thanksgiving, 1958. I’m 16, wearing my feed and seed store hat, stalking Tom turkey. My 16 gauge shotgun, # 6 shot, ready.

It’s early, barely dawn. The air is still. Nothing moves. A chill lingers in the deep woods. A soft dew lies on molding leaves. My steps are Indian-like, soft and silent. I pause, listen, wait. Tom wakes. He gobbles. Twice.

I crouch. The sunrise sky silhouettes his regal form in the branches of an overhead tree. I whistle. He flies. Bam! The gun erupts and feathers explode. Thanksgiving dinner lies lifeless on the forest floor. A young boy’s Thanksgiving memory is made. A tail feather becomes part of the treasures of things past.

Thanksgivings consist in memories. They’re more than single, isolated recollections. There’s a transcendent quality about it, something more difficult to pick up on than hot, buttered biscuits oozing sorghum syrup. It resides in our collective and shared remembrances, the building blocks of tradition; and in the allure of something more permanent than the fugitive concept of ‘home.’

There’s something more about Thanksgiving than just a meal. Something more than turkey and dressing, rice and gravy, cranberries and creamed corn, sweet potatoes and marshmallows, green beans and field peas, ambrosia and heavenly hash, caramel cakes and pecan pies and sweet iced tea.

It surpasses the nomadic, annual family gatherings…cooking, talking, catching up, slowing down. It’s something difficult to define. Its evanescence floats in the air of a roasting turkey. It’s subsumed in smiles, in laughter and hugs, and in the traits of family dysfunctions…a peculiar uncle, a hippy cousin, a camouflaged hunter, a teenage Fashionista. It’s all that, yet more.

There’s more to it than the dining room table setting, the family patriarch at the head. Children relegated to the kitchen table, waiting for the day of promotion to the ‘big table.’ The ‘seen-but-not-heard’ rule still applies.

It’s more than the essential ritual of the Blessing of the Meal. Cold horror grips us as we anticipate the breadth and duration of the petition. My grandfather always prayed. A devout Baptist deacon, he asked for God’s grace on everything…our sinning souls, the turkey’s last measure of devotion, the farm animals, the old sow, the worn-out mule and the hunting dogs. Kitchen doorknobs were sometimes mentioned, and once something about my grandmother’s hairdo. It never came up again.

Thanksgiving is more than orange pumpkins, frost on the grass, the red-leaf sumac, crisp fall air, the hint of burning leaves and the dew’s diaphanous mist over a cow-filled pasture. Time slows to its circadian rhythm, and breathing is possible again.

Still, there’s more to Thanksgiving than afternoon naps, TV football, a neighborhood stroll and the clipping of Black Friday coupons…all of which happen after the kitchen cleanup and the left-overs are stored for the next pot-luck meal.

Thanksgiving in our small town included an afternoon drive to the farm to ‘check on things.’ Change is slow on farms after harvest. You have to look twice to see it. Our family was inextricably connected to lands purchased in the mid-1800’s. We needed to make certain it was still there. It always was.

The list of ‘more’ goes on. You have your own. So, what is the essence of Thanksgiving? What is its ‘transcendent quality?’ It’s elusive, even profound. Our hearts define its existence.

This year only my wife Carolyn, my daughter Leslie and I celebrate the occasion. Small, yes, but somehow we put another tail-feather in our treasures of things now past. Our son, Alex, remains in Colorado, working on his house renovation. Our extended family has become feeble, fractured and far off. The farm has been sold. Another farmer’s family ‘checks on it.’ Thanksgivings change and often can be sad!

I stand outside while the dogs complete their nightly business. I gaze into a thick black sky studded with stars. I try to comprehend its transcendence. A useless endeavor…it’s awesome, intellectually impenetrable and hopelessly unfathomable. Such is Thanksgiving to me. In the final analysis, it is what it is, and I leave it at that.

Yes, Thanksgiving is more than just a meal and a transitory home. But what would it be without either? So while you gnaw on the last left-over turkey leg, meditate on the miracle of it all…even if you don’t understand it. And thank God for the bounty in your life. Gobble, gobble.

Bud Hearn
November 22, 2012