How to Be Thankful

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Ginger Pumpkin Pie ready for the oven

I wake up early to Thanksgiving day gray and raining. My wife got up in the night, sleep wouldn’t catch for her like so many nights these days, and I make enough noise making coffee that she leaves the couch for the bed. The weather keeps the day from feeling like it should start, which means M&Q might sleep forever. I say let them; the world, beautiful and mean, will be there when they get up, and they deserve the rest.

These are the times I like — everyone home like they never left. Q back from college through the week, M released from classes and performances, my wife and I mostly off from work. It’s curious how people enter and pass through your life, some like a road that accompanies a river for a while then curves away, others like two highways crossing at a point, each long-legged in either direction. Some old familiar roads eventually run to dirt and then give out into field or forest, even when you’re not ready for them to end.

I’m not sure why I’m drawn to questions more than answers, why I feel more comfortable in doubt than in its absence. The butter being softened by the room that Q and I will use to make ginger pumpkin pie like we always do. M has gotten good at making focaccia, and his dough is a magician in the fridge doing its trick. My wife is trying a new fancy cauliflower recipe this year to give Q, now a vegetarian, something to put in the center of her plate. These are facts like any other, as real as the realest thing. Today they’re enough.

There is so much to be grateful for that it almost overwhelms. This life that I have built, or helped build and participated in, is so rich, so wonderful, that I can’t help but be called to thought. Tradition, at first blush, seems like a way to remind us of it all, but I believe that regular ritual is a way of containing a bit of it for us to inhabit meaningfully for a short while.

The rain keeps up, and the rest of the family starts to rise. I bring my wife a coffee to help her step up out of her brief night into the day. She is excited to love us all through food. Q will come out of her room with a notebook and a book, probably poetry, ready to write in each. And the first thing M will do, as he always does, is pick up a guitar and pull music into this world.

Thank you for subscribing and for coming here to this little corner of the internet. Thank you for traveling with me until we curve apart and come back around. I truly am grateful.

Okay, better finish up. Pie won’t make itself. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.