Good Morning.
No menus today. People know exactly what they're having for dinner tomorrow and are up to their eyeballs in groceries being converted into the great American feast. Some of us are hunting for cobwebs we've ignored for several months. Some of us will head for the liquor store later on and have a definite opinion about whether red or white is better with turkey.
A lot of families aren't together. People in California are displaced by the wildfires that have burned entire neighborhoods to the ground and shrouded the state in smoke. Servicemen and women are deployed to Afghanistan and elsewhere, even down at the border where huge rolls of barbed wire are being put in place to deter anyone trying to enter the country. Relatives aren't speaking to each other because of old grudges, fresh wounds, and political divisiveness.
Back in the day there were forest fires caused by lightning strikes or a match carelessly tossed at a campsite but nothing like the massive inferno on the west coast. People in uniform were at war in Korea and later in Vietnam and communication was by snail mail; it was, indeed, very, very slow, so the new stuff is clearly an improvement although I'm not sure it's done much for the pilgrim quality of patience. There were estrangements within families, but I never saw any in mine. Whatever our differences, we set them aside for Thanksgiving, got all dressed up, and sat down at a table with a white cloth, matching napkins, and platters piled high with food prepared from recipes handwritten on index cards and kept in a small tin box. The conversation centered on neutral, safe subjects like the weather or someone's new car or who won the World Series back in October. It was probably the same format in many homes. The man of the house carved the turkey at the table, and everything else was passed from person to person. People didn't seem to have as many food allergies back then.
Doctors made house calls, old folks waved at the neighbors from the front porch, the paper was delivered by a kid on a bike and read in a comfortable chair, and people paid cash for everything, including the groceries, their clothing, even a vacation. If you didn't have the money, you didn't buy the new suit or go to the Grand Canyon. You stayed home and watched vanilla sitcoms about perfect families like the Cleavers and the Nelsons and you watched half an hour of news before dinner. There were no twenty-four hour cable networks with breaking news every two minutes. Breaking just might be the operative word here.
There were occasional bank robberies but no school shootings. Nobody was hooked on opioids, and pot, grass, and weed were gardening terms. People drank alcohol but did so in the safety and comfort of their homes rather than at a bar, now the primary social gathering place in every community large and small. Life expectancy wasn't as great because hearts couldn't be bypassed and kidneys couldn't be transplanted, but there wasn't as much cancer for some reason although there was
another kind of malignancy in the form of discrimination against too many American citizens.
The thing that seems to endure is the intangible we call tradition, addressed with delicious bravado in the song from Fiddler on the Roof. Tevya knew something about what holds people together and he knew it at a time and in a place of political upheaval and strife. Interesting.
Best regards,
Elisabeth
P.S. Red
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