Some things change; some things stay the same. However, I can assure you that the woman behind the counter at the Walmart in Mexico Maine selling frozen turkeys didn’t look at all like the picture.
[Editor’s Note: I first offered this sentiment nine years ago. Since then, I’ve lost everything, several times over, except for my family, so I have lost nothing. We will have Thanksgiving today, and mean it. You should, too]
There are lots of news stories available — the majority of them, I think — expounding on the horrors of Thanksgiving. “Send us your dysfunctional family Thanksgiving disaster stories” is the lede on every radio program I can find, at least those that haven’t jumped the gun entirely and started with, “Tell us your Christmas horror stories.”
I’m not having it. Thanksgiving is lovely. Or it should be.
Thanksgiving doesn’t beat around the bush. Right in the name it tells you it’s a day to be grateful. Complaining about it seems to me to be like going to the art museum and complaining that the paintings are obscuring your view of the walls.
Hmm. Perhaps that’s a bad simile. I’ve been to many museums where the dropcloth daubs they hang on the walls aren’t as interesting as the off-white paint, now that I consider it. So please insert Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy in the preceding paragraph where art museum appears. Thanks.
Anyway, it’s not about you. For one day, at least, I don’t want to hear about your crabby attitude towards your assembled family and your overcooked turkey. I don’t want to hear about the lousy TV you’ve got to watch the football game on. I don’t care if you don’t like the floats that drift by Macy’s like garish barrage balloons. Put a sock in it. It’s not about you.
It’s not about any of us. It’s about remembering that everything we have is a gift, and we could lose it, and we should take time out from our lives for one day a year and acknowledge that.
Have you ever been in a soup kitchen on Thanksgiving? I hate the preening socialites and politicians that visit there on Thanksgiving to get face time on TV. I think much more kindly about the people that feed those poor souls on November 22nd and November 24th, when the cameras aren’t interested.
There’s a look on a person’s face, when someone gives them something they need that they might not have otherwise. It’s the look on the face of the man in line at the soup kitchen. It’s gratitude.
I’m going to give it a try tomorrow, that look. It looks like Thanksgiving.
My life is endlessly interesting. There’s a Chinese proverb, “May you live in interesting times.” It’s meant as a curse, of course, but I have to take my pleasures as I find them. My life hasn’t been boring for so long I forget what boring looks like. Three square meals a day and central heating is what I imagine it looks like, but how would I know?
My older son is off visiting a friend for a few days. My younger son, who is 12, likes to sleep in his room when the large son is away. The room is ten feet away from his own room, but a big brother’s room has special magical powers that make it magical and special and tautological. He also likes using big brother’s computer. It’s a special treat that also makes no sense. His older brother’s computer is at least a decade old and runs Vista. The computer in his own room is newer and faster, and at least has Windows 7, but the magic beans extend to his brother’s computer, not just the room itself.
Before school and after school we pretty much let the little feller do what he wants. He spends most of his time monkeying around with various computer programming tasks. He’s learned a scripting language in order to produce new versions of Doom rooms, likes working on it a lot, and has basically abandoned Minecraft over it. Kid stuff.
Doom is an old “First Person Shooter” that invented a lot of what is take for granted nowadays in computer games. The computer language that runs it looks vaguely like Javascript to my eye. He knows at least a smattering of Javascript, HTML, and several other programming languages. He uses Khan Academy to learn what he wants, and he has a big pile of programming books that a friend of ours gave to him in a fit of generosity.
I looked over his shoulder this morning as he was writing code. He looks really funny in the morning. His hair is going this way and that from his nightly battle with the Laocoon of his pillows. He still has sleep seeds in his eyes, but he can’t wait to get at the computer.
On the screen was the usual text editor window used to code Doom levels. Inside the text editor was something that looked entirely like hieroglyphs to my eye. It was like four hundred Led Zeppelin IV album covers strung together. Line after line of something way past gibberish, because regular computer scripts look like gibberish anyway. This looked like a telegram from Alpha Centauri. What the hell are you doing, son?
I’m writing Doom scripts in WingDings, Dad. Duh.
That’s Rocky Gresset and Noe Reinhardt playing Them There Eyes.
I really feel compelled to correct the grammar in that song. Not sure why. Old habits die hard, I guess. Those there eyes? No, that won’t get it done. Those eyes there? That’s better, but not quite the knees of the bees, I think.
When in doubt, spray in commas like an Arab, I always say. Even if they’re used incorrectly, they give the reader a pleasant place to stop and rest awhile. They’re like a bench in a park. Here goes: Those eyes, there.
Hmm. That’s grammatically correct, but the meaning has changed somehow. It’s possible that it might be preferable to use a semicolon instead of a comma, but I’m fairly certain that semicolons aren’t allowed on the Intertunnel anymore. I’d put an exclamation point after: there, but exclamation points are just used instead of periods now, so it wouldn’t have the proper declamatory effect.
All I really need to do is need to sneak up on: Those eyes that that girl is in possession of. Oh, dear. Anytime I see “that that” abroad in the land of a sentence I just wrote, I have visions of a nun and the sound of a ruler dopplering towards my knuckles. Also, the song is all bollixed up and wishes to intimate that the beauty is in the eye of the beheld, which can lead to a dangerous feedback loop now that selfies are en vogue. I also feel as though I should specify the gender of the beauty of the beheld of the eye. I’m a guy person, and rarely notice the eyes of another guy unless I’m poking them in a bar brawl, so I’ll go with a girlie eye from here on out.
“That girl is pleasantly ocularly equipped.” That mellifluous combo works well enough, but the spellchecker is freaking out over “ocularly.” There it goes again. You’d think that after you wrote it once, it would leave you alone after that, but it keeps on telling me that ocularly isn’t a word. It’s weird knowing more words than the spellchecker and Maceo Pinkard, Doris Tauber and William Tracey.
I think I have it now: “I’m fairly certain that neither of that woman’s eyes are made of glass, or both are.” Perfection. Someone’s going to have to get busy on the chord structure, though. It doesn’t seem to fit anymore. I had a hunch something was wrong with that, too.
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