THIS DAY

This day has been set aside to give thanks. We sit among others, often family members with whom we have the longest shared history but sometimes among friends whose common history with us is more short-lived.  We look around and chat over appetizers, converse over dinner, and share stories over dessert.  As household traditions differ so do the foods prepared and enjoyed… but this day is really a food fest and a share fest, a TV football fest and a kitchen cleanup fest, disguising its real place on our calendar.  For this day was marked out as a day of thanks.

It is easy to transform the sequence I’ve just described into a thankful sequence.  Different dishes prepared by different cooks can conjure up the original cooks who presented those dishes the first time we ever enjoyed them.  In a moment of visualization our mind’s eye can magically turn Mom or Cousin Hannah into YiaYia or Grandma or Teta or Sittoo or Nonna or Abuela or Babushka or Bibi or Grand-mere.  And that transformation, however instantaneous, fills our heart with a memory as palpable as the savory smells surrounding us.

Between bites we share in conversations comprising recollections, perceptions, and vignettes.  Because they typically involve others frozen in time by the story, it’s a simple task to travel into the tale and stand next to Uncle Carl when he was 50 and you were 15.  Without a problem you can feel Grandpa’s 70 year old hand steadying yours as your 6-year old legs walk double-time to keep up on the coveted trip to the corner store for candy.  Effortlessly you can smell your Daddy’s shaving cream, or your Mommy’s perfume, or your neighbor Kate’s blueberry pie. 

It is true that many of those who fill our picture book of memories are gone – living far away or passed from this life.  But this day is a perfect day exactly because we can bring them back to us, and to those in our company, for a brief moment of perfect recollection.  By hearing the story of whose lives influenced ours, all around us will learn something about what makes us who we are.  And that leads me to the kernel which I believe is the real essence of Thanksgiving.

I conjure up a sensory memory.  It evokes a vision of a moment, a season, or a lifetime of loving, caring, belonging. If it resonates sufficiently, I naturally seek to hold onto it. Prolonging that memory provokes a deeper truth about who I am today.  I am filled with gratitude and I ponder how much of the richness of my life today draws its source from someone who walked before me one, two, even three generations ago.  For even as I know that a good deed done today is rarely rewarded (and, in its pure goodness, seeks no reward), I firmly believe that its reward is received eventually.  My grandparents’ selflessness towards others may come back to me in a serendipity gesture of kindness from a stranger.  So, too, my outreach to a stranger may be responded to by that stranger’s progeny 50 years from now.   

We stand on the shoulders of those who came before us.  Never is that more true that when we are our best selves, engaging in actions at least as unselfish as those actions done on behalf of others by our ancestors.  And while our true legacy may seem, on this day, to be somehow reduced to a series of recollections, I believe it to be as much a call to engagement.  With hearts filled with gratitude, may we each, this day, plant seeds of goodness along our path, that those who come after us may reap an abundant harvest.