Thanksgiving Wishes

Thanksgiving is the great American family holiday. Sarah and I have always spent Thanksgiving with family members since we put our five kids together into one blended family forty-four years ago. This year we are on our way to Tiki Island Texas to do that once again. We’ll be at the home of our son Ned and his family. Our son Matt and his family will join us there.

With four surviving children, eight grandchildren, one great-grandchild, three spouses and our wonderful son-in-law, Jay, the single Dad of our twin grandchildren, it is hard to get everybody together. But we succeeded once in 2017 with only one child not able to make it. We all met at Disney World. It was a wonderful occasion, organized by Matt with Ned’s assistance. Perhaps we’ll be able to do that again some place, some time. I fervently hope so. And I hope you have a great Thanksgiving!

Here is a picture of our gang at Thanksgiving dinner in 2017. And I am reposting the Thanksgiving story I return to each year.

Thanksgiving 1956

In those long-ago days when the first frost came in mid-October and the whole state of South Carolina had not a single retirement community, we always got up early on Thanksgiving morning and went rabbit hunting. I’d take the .22 I’d gotten for my fourteenth birthday, like every other boy I knew, and Rob and Dickie and I would meet near the big cotton field on the dirt road we lived along just as the sun was coming up. We’d walk across the fields we had spent much of our lives crossing, hoping something would turn up, but not worried if something didn’t. The company of each other and tradition were the thing.

We didn’t have dogs, so it was luck and a little skill if we got a rabbit. Now squirrels we always got. But rabbits were something else. Dickie was the best if a rabbit broke cover. He never missed. The fields went on for a couple of miles, abandoned cattle pasture, planted with new pines just coming up. Around the fields were oak and hickory forests, forests that went on for twenty miles or more to the Wateree and Congaree swamps.

Everyone along our road was of modest means, but we didn’t know it when we were young, so it didn’t matter to us. Not everyone is lucky enough to be of modest means. I was at a conference sixteen years ago and went to a workshop on classism. We did an activity about how you grew up. There were a lot of questions like when you were growing up did you take vacations where you visited relatives. If you did, you stayed put, but if you went to a resort, you took a step forward. Or if you got a job when you were young and gave the money to your parents, you would step backward. We did this in a long hall. When it was over, this one Black guy from Watts and me were the only ones at one end of the hall. Everybody else was at the other end. It never hit me until then, at the age of 67, just how much richer my early life seemed to be compared to the lives of my fellow psychotherapists.

Back in those fields, where Rob and Dickie and I still hunt in my memory of that day, the sun came up full and revealed the frost as intricate crystals in the sides of the eroded red clay gullies where a hundred years of cotton planting had ruined the soil. When we were in elementary school, we and the other kids in our rural community would get to the bus stop early to play marbles in the sand in front of a red clay bank filled with those ice crystals. They were beautiful. Later on, in high school, Dickie drove the school bus and Rob and I would ride with him on the whole route. He graduated in 1958, two years before us, and we had to find new ways to enjoy our ride on the bus until we graduated.

We didn’t get any rabbits in 1956, and we went home around nine or ten. It would be a really good day. There was turkey in the oven and none of our dads had started drinking yet. Our dads were funny drunks, not mean drunks at all, fun to listen to. We’d have a lot to eat and would see each other after dinner. Dickie’s cousin, who was the prettiest girl in Lower Richland County, would come over and we’d all get to look at her. The world would go on like we had always known it to be.

Dickie would become an officer in the Army, flying helicopters, like he dreamed of, and would die in 1969 on his third mission of the day evacuating wounded from a hole in the jungle. Rob would become a Marine, like his dad, and die at Khe Sanh. I would get lucky and never have a thing happen to me during seven years of military service. I’m eighty-three years old and have lived long enough now to know I have no notion of what life is about. But I know for sure that if there is an answer to that question, it lies back there in 1956.