Where’s the Thanks in Thanksgiving?

“There’s nothing better for a man, than that he should eat and drink, and that he should make his soul enjoy good in his labor...that it was from the hand of God.” Ecclesiastes 2:24

Thanksgiving…the very concept conjures up evocative nostalgia. A silent bell tolls in our hearts, reviving the pilgrim spirit inherited from the Plymouth Plantation. Tradition is dusted off, Norman Rockwell is resurrected and a 24-hour moratorium is placed on familial grievances.

The vast migration has begun. About 49 million Americans are making the pilgrimage ‘home’ to extended families. Roads and airports are clogged, folks in a hurry, tempers short, children exhausted, courtesies abandoned. Most will arrive in time, descending on the old home place and thinking of Thanksgiving dinner.

This year’s harvest is in. Most have no sweat equity in it. Toil? Really? It’s too easy to purchase the fruits of another’s labor. In fact, harvests of today bear little resemblance to harvests of a bygone era.

Few recall the days when mules were tractors, the days of smokehouse hams and sausages, syrup making, pumpkin gathering and sweet potato banks. Days of crisp air and frosty grass; days before irrigation, genetic seeds and labels that read, “Imported.”

Former harvests were unpredictable, subject to the vicissitudes of nature and insects, and thick with the sweat of hard labor. In those days serious supplications were made for Divine favor, unlike the easy platitudes now uttered.

The term ‘harvest’ has lost its strength. Our collective hands are soft, no blisters. Our fingers do the walking, our tongues do the talking. Cash is our reaping scythe.

At Plymouth Plantation, 1621, the harvest was hard-earned from the hard scrabble earth. The community pooled their resources and labor to eke out a survival. ‘Thanksgiving’ meant gratitude then. It was not a secular ‘Black Friday’ event like today’s pagan harvest festival. It was a genuine thanksgiving to the Creator for the land’s bounty. Can you imagine yourself there?

Indigenous natives arrived at the celebration with an abundance of turnips, corn and fish. By noon the village was assembled, thanks given to the Almighty for the bounty of another year, and the feast began. It lasted for days. Feasts are always more enjoyable with a crowd.

Today, we are largely indifferent to the idea of a communal Thanksgiving. Churches and charities do their best to feed the hungry, which does represent in a small way the essence of our collective spirit. We’re a nation of individuals, gathering with friends and family in smaller settings. We remain segregated from the egalitarian life of our communities. Consequently, we fail to reap their intrinsic strengths.

Notwithstanding, Thanksgiving remains a warm celebration of congeniality and reunion, and a time of remembrance. Yes, to remember the ‘old days,’ to say a silent prayer for the ‘empty chairs’ at our tables, and remember fondly those who have moved on and the new ones now in high chairs. We remember happy times; we laugh, and maybe even cry a little.

Thanksgivings would be incomplete without the often comedic dysfunctional aspects of family homecomings. After a few days of ‘catching up,’ and with everyone sick of turkey and dressing, and often each other, the party breaks up and the crowd heads home.

With packed cars, abundant hugs and turkey sandwiches to go, the weary pilgrims depart and join the returning throngs, cursing the traffic and vowing never to do it again…until next year, that is.

Now ‘next year’ has arrived, and the tradition of Thanksgiving is revived in our hearts. We’ll celebrate another harvest in this land of abundance, an incomprehensible gift of grace from the beneficent hand of God.

As we gather around our tables Thursday, let’s remember to thank the Source of all blessings. Remember to thank those in other lands who protect our liberties and for those who have given their last measure of devotion for our freedoms.

May your Thanksgiving harvest fill your cornucopia to overflowing with abundance.


Bud Hearn
November 24, 2015

Luck of the Draw

Friday, 13th. Playing cards is a game of luck. It’s easier to curse the draw than to play the hand that’s dealt.

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First, let’s be clear on one thing…I’m no authority on games of chance. Not that I don’t believe playing cards is an entertaining pursuit for wiling away the time. But most of us are long past the days of strip poker where keeping score actually meant something.

Keeping score cuts both ways…good and bad. Scores are kept on everything, from cards to spousal compliance. My score has been written more than once on the house calendars. The last one read, “What was I thinking?” It was written next to a crude sketch of a skull and cross-bones.

My wife and friends are addicted to duplicate bridge. They get high for hours discussing conventions, bids, no-trumps and sartorial selections. Such arcana breed boredom. But to their credit, their discourses are decorous, unlike boastful golfers with beer breath.

Bridge players are like Bobby Fischer, the iconic genius chess player who liked to play a computer. He said he remembered every play he ever made, in every game he ever played. He often sat on park benches, talking to himself and drooling. He died at 64. Bridge players should take this to heart.

Ok, I hear the chorus tuning up, refuting the ‘waste-of-time’ refrain. It’s a cerebral game, they preach, brain food, fosters social relationships. Perhaps, but it hardly trumps watching presidential debates, which affords lunacy a public podium and affirms the Netflix drama, House of Cards.

I’m not qualified to argue with the bridge lobby. I’ve only tried the game once. The experience reminds me of that infamous day when I was three years old and stuck in the back seat of a car with my grandparents. I was forced to ‘hold it’ for four hours. For some things, once is enough.

There’s more to my aversion to cards. Frankly, luck seems too improbable to calculate with any degree of certainty. I never trusted it. It requires risk. I flunked statistical analysis in college. Playing poker all night with a bunch of fraternity-house drunks had no future. Sorority houses offered superior options with better odds.

Risk has its downside. An innate element of euphoria is attached to it, the seductive whisper of Satan, “I dare you!” Endorphins surge into the brain’s mental receptors and nothing’s off limits. Sorta like the paroxysm that adrenaline produces when getting caught with your pants down in the wrong place. Speaking vicariously, of course.

My first recollection of cards was Old Maid. A fun game, no score kept. The sole purpose for the hours spent at the kitchen table was to avoid being left holding the Old Maid. According to reality TV, it seems a lot of people played this game. Many got left ‘holding the bag,’ so to speak. Self-fulfilling prophesies are a highly probable algorithm.

I admit to having played Solitaire. I had my reasons. While assessing a rapidly declining cognitive state, I kept no score. I can truthfully say I never lost. But even if I had, private failure is preferable to public ridicule. I recommend it for those of low self-esteem. Cheap therapy.

Once I played ‘Liar’s Poker’ at Harrison’s, a pub on Peachtree Road. A horrid mistake. A $10 ante. The pot swelled. Dollars were shuffled. We would soon bet the serial numbers on the bill we’d been dealt. Winner takes all. Nobody leaves until the dealin’s done. But there was alcohol involved, which often sends things sideways.

Before the game begins I announce, “Now boys, one game for me. Wife says be home. OK?” They shrug in difference.

“Deal,” someone shouts. The bluffs begin. I get lucky, seize the loot and sprint to the parking lot, chased by nine drunken gamblers. Look, the risk of bodily harm is never worth a measly $100 pot.

Life deals its own cards. Some get aces, others get deuces. But we all have a choice in how we play the hand.

Kenny Rogers sums it up in song, “You got to know when to hold them, know when to fold them, know when to walk away, know when to run.”

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Life is a gamble with incredible odds; if it were a bet, would we take it? But we had no choice. So, ante up, see another card. And I dare you to raise the bet.


Bud Hearn
November 13, 2015

Chew On This for a While

“Over the lips, across the tongue, look out tummy, here it comes.”

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Not much of a toast. Short, simple, sufficient. A little ditty my friend, Tom, recited on the cusp of swallowing something toxic, usually with the names of Jack, Jim or George. His excesses sent him away early.

Stomachs endure a harsh and servile environment. They’re slave to the whims of the eyes and vicissitudes of the mind, both savage and insatiable tyrants. Tom’s ditty was an early warning refrain.

Carnal lusts crave chocolate, all things fried and panaceas of 80 proof. A civil war rages inside the body. Destruction is its fate. What does it matter who wins the war, prime ribs or Jack, a superfluity of steroids or cirrhosis?

My mama knew these things. She wasn’t a philosopher, but she was one helluva good cook. She had respect for the belly. I trusted her explicitly until the day she tried to trick me into eating liver. It scared me for life. I suffered PTSD before it became popular.

Oh, it looked so tasty, so wholesome. Those smothered onions on top, a large dollop of ketchup on the side, mashed potatoes swimming in gravy, biscuits the size of baseballs, Kentucky pole beans and steaming hot apple cobbler. Never trust anything that seems so perfect!

There were clues that something was up as I walked home from school that day for lunch. Yeah, we could walk home for lunch in small towns. Plus, we went barefoot until the World Series ended and again after April 1st. Seems strange now, as quaint as yesteryear’s backyard clotheslines. Pity kids today without these perks. They’re emotionally damaged goods.

Anyway, about a block away a vile smell wafted onto the crisp October air, and not that of fried chicken. No! This stench singed magnolia leaves. Their scorched, shriveled torsos littered the sidewalks in a fetal, death-like repose.

So foul was the odor that birds flew wildly in a migratory frenzy, seeking refuge. Our house appeared to be on fire, so intense was the smoke from the kitchen window. I pinched my nose and opened the door.

“Oh, son, I cooked you something special today,” mama said. Then I saw the source of this noxious pollution, a lifeless slab of black meat lying on the plate. Taste me, taste me, it taunted.

As you know, children are always starving. They’ll try eating anything once. My mother stood by the stove in her white apron, smiling as I took the first bite. I remember her words:
“Son, always chew your food well, 32 times for each bite,” she said.

Young boys are like dogs in many respects. Once food’s in the mouth, there’s no turning back. The teeth get about two hits on it before it crosses the tongue and is long gone south.

Her smile soon turned to panic along with the hopeless grimace on my face. I chewed and chewed and chewed that wretched flesh. With each chew it got bigger and bigger and bigger. It wouldn’t go down. My mouth had become the host for an alien creature that used it to multiply its loathsome offspring.

My mouth bloated, my eyes bulged and my body swelled. I felt the end was near. The consequences of that meal live in infamy to this day. Even now, life is a struggle to survive the remembrance of this brutal abuse of my childhood innocence.

Since this episode, and until I left home, I avoided mama’s strange mystery meat. Not that I distrusted my sweet mother’s intents, but as it’s said, “Trust, but verify.” From that day on I relied on my dog, Whitey, to be the canary in the cave, as it were, to test mama’s mysterious victuals.

Whether this was an isolated case of unintentional poisoning or some out-of-body experience, I can’t say. I simply refer to it as ‘the day that the liver multiplied.’ Trust is hard to build, quick to evaporate, and almost impossible to renew.

A vile smoke reeks regularly from the Congressional kitchen. Their disguised promises smell like liver and are served up by toady bureaucratic parasites. The insidious cycle of toxic giveaways gets bigger and bigger and bigger.

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The choice of swallowing these loathsome handouts is ours. Who will volunteer to be the canary? Now, chew on this allegory for a while and see if you can get it to go down.


Bud Hearn
November 6, 2015