Gray Friday

Today is a gray day. There was rain earlier–the sidewalks were damp when I took in this week’s grocery delivery–but it did not rain while I walked Roxy, except for a sprinkle or two right as we arrived back home.

While we were walking, I heard a flock of Canada geese honking overhead, far above the reach of anyone’s holiday dinner table.

Today J and I will take our usual afternoon walk around the neighborhood, followed perhaps by a short drive. Yesterday the streets and sidewalks were mostly empty, more of our neighbors choosing to travel for the holiday than in the past two pandemic years.

Still, we saw and noted groups of pedestrians who were obviously visiting for Thanksgiving: large multi-generational groups including multiple dogs and bored teenagers who looked like spending time with extended family would kill them.

 

Offline

Thanksgiving happens at the almost-end of the semester, so for me it is a working holiday. Instead of joining the throngs of people traveling by plane, train, or automobile to visit family, I typically spend the long holiday weekend catching up with grading.

But on Thanksgiving itself, I try to stay offline, grading as many papers as possible the day before, then doing everything in my power to keep my laptop off until Black Friday, when I return to my paper piles.

During the height of the pandemic, we learned that many of us can be as productive at home as in the office…but this isn’t necessarily a good thing. Work from home readily morphs into work anytime, anywhere, without the boundaries that are necessary for a healthy work/life balance.

So while I will write by hand in my journal today, this is a post I prepared yesterday, on Thanksgiving eve, so I can quickly press “publish” today before curling up with a dog, book, and blanket: an abundance of things to be thankful for.

 

The time warp again

Already it’s late November: almost Thanksgiving, which means the end of Fall semester will be here in a flash.

Every year I warn my first-year students about the post-Thanksgiving time warp. Every Fall, students and faculty alike look forward to Thanksgiving as a chance to rest and recuperate, and every Fall, students and faculty alike are dismayed to realize how much work awaits them when they return from Thanksgiving, the end of the semester looming large.

Every year, I tell my first-year students that semester-time doesn’t work like regular time, but every year, they don’t believe me until December, when they experience this time warp themselves. The days before Thanksgiving move at a snail’s pace, but after the holiday is over, it will feel like we’ve stepped into a bobsled.

 

Giving thanks

There’s much to be thankful for this year, even as the pandemic continues. J and I got our booster shots a month ago, exactly six months after our second Pfizer dose: as soon (in other words) as we were eligible. This time last year, I was teaching hybrid classes in half-empty classrooms; this year, my classrooms are full of vaccinated students, my colleagues have returned to campus, and I don’t think twice about wearing a mask inside stores, the library, and museums.

Now that J and I have been boosted and the weather is cold, we’ve returned to eating lunch twice a week inside our favorite pub: a bit of normalcy that feels good for the soul. I’m not sure we’ll ever return to the old normal of the Before Times: I suspect we’ll always startle when we hear someone cough or sneeze in public, and I’ll probably continue wearing a mask indoors during cold and flu season.

But the early days of lockdown, when nonessential businesses were closed and J and I didn’t venture out even for take-out food, seem very far away. We’re learning how to live with the virus, recognizing COVID has changed our lives in lasting ways, and in a strange way I’m grateful for that, too.

 

Homebody holiday

This year like last, J and I are planning a quiet Thanksgiving at home. Even in the Before Times, I never enjoyed traveling for the holidays, when roads, airports, and train stations are crowded. In the years before the pandemic, J and I would go to a fancy restaurant for Thanksgiving; last year, we had a turkey dinner delivered from a local catering company, then J divided the food into three meals we ate over the course of the holiday weekend.

This year’s Thanksgiving feast was delivered today, so the refrigerator is full. I went to Trader Joe’s last week to avoid going to the grocery store this week, and we literally have nowhere to go tomorrow: no crowds or traffic to navigate.

Now that I’m back to teaching in-person, I remember with strange nostalgia the early days of the pandemic, when introverts were in high clover, not having to come up with an excuse to stay home and avoid social events. Although I don’t want to return to the days of complete lockdown, I’m looking forward to hunkering down for the long weekend. Teaching gives me more than enough social stimulation; what I need right now is a chance to recharge my batteries at home.

 

Tradition

For the third year in a row, J and I went to Davio’s in Chestnut Hill for Thanksgiving dinner. Instead of ordering a traditional turkey dinner, we ordered off the menu: J had filet mignon, and I ordered scallops. We split a cocktail between us and shared his and her desserts: a cranberry tart for J, and maple creme brulee for me.

Although J and I often go out to lunch, we rarely have dinner out, so Thanksgiving is our annual splurge. We make reservations for the late afternoon so we can get home in time to feed the dogs and do our evening pet tasks. This year, we were home and I had changed into pajamas by 5:30 pm, long after dark.

 

Count your losses

Earlier today I paged through the weekly planner I use to track my monthly goals, and it was sobering to see a week-by-week account of the various stresses I’ve withstood this past year: the day we put Bobbi to sleep in April; the various hospitalizations, rehab appointments, and medical setbacks that culminated in Toivo’s death in July; and my Dad’s passing in September.

With each of these losses came a grief that was necessarily compartmentalized: with other obligations to tend to, I haven’t had the luxury of lengthy mourning. Unable to find the time to fall apart, I’ve simply had to soldier on, each loss layering over the previous.

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, a day we are told to count our blessings, an endeavor I full-heartedly support. And yet, I sometimes bridle against the performative nature of Thanksgiving, as if giving thanks counts only if you do it in a festive and properly public way. Although I have no problem with giving thanks, the mass-marketed version of Thanksgiving portrayed in both conventional and social media gives me pause, as it reflects a quintessentially American optimism that papers over more painful experiences with a veneer of positivity.

I’m happy if you indeed are “blessed not stressed,” but in all honesty, some of us are both blessed and stressed in equal measures, and I don’t think there should be any shame in counting one’s losses alongside one’s blessings. If we count only our blessings, we acknowledge only the bright side, not the accompanying shadow, and I don’t believe you can have one without the other.

When we count our losses, we acknowledge too our lessons. As much as I wish I’d had the complete catharsis of allowing myself to fall to pieces on any given day this year, soldiering on has taught me something not only about myself, but about the nature of grief itself. They say “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” but to experiences that gain, you have to open yourself up to the accompanying pain.

I think a superficial counting of blessings can be misleading and even harmful: a kind of self-censorship where we allow others (and ourselves) to see only our polished and perfect side: something I might call the Instagram-ification of our inner lives, where every experience is rendered through a rose-colored filter. If I share only my happy and picture-perfect moments, I lie to both myself and others, and my gratitude can veer painfully close a boastful form of one-upmanship.

Ultimately, I worry that the counting of blessings alone is a kind of betrayal to the ones we’ve lost. If we can’t acknowledge the pain of loss, how can we feel the depth of love? Our societal rush to Get Over any emotion that isn’t purely positive is the worst kind of superficiality. If we are comfortable sharing happiness but not pain, our interactions will be emotionally amputated: only happy, never sad.

I am grateful for my blessings, but I am grateful, too, for the painful lessons of impermanence, mortality, and grief, as well as the love that preceded them. Perhaps Thanksgiving makes sense only when coupled with that other November holiday, the Day of the Dead. Our blessings shine more brightly when we remember the darkness that dwells alongside them.

 

Stars and shadows

I’ve decided I feel about Thanksgiving the same way I feel about Valentine’s Day: sympathetic in theory but a bit embarrassed in practice. When you feel grateful and loving every day, it’s a bit discomfiting to be told to display those private emotions in a publicly ostensible way once a year. Both Valentine’s Day and Thanksgiving strike me as being almost skeptical in nature. It’s not enough to privately love or be grateful; instead, these two holidays demand we prove it.

Although there are plenty of folks who decry the forced, greeting-card quality of Valentine’s Day, uttering similar sentiments about Thanksgiving is incredibly curmudgeonly: how can one rightly be antagonistic toward a holiday devoted to gratitude and food? But even though gratitude and food are indeed two of my favorite things, the simple fact remains: I’m always a bit relieved to have Thanksgiving over, the calendrical requirement to be sufficiently grateful crossed off the list for another year.

This is more than a bit ironic, however, since if I had to offer an honest description of my daily spiritual practice, it would be this: my religion is gratitude. Gratitude is not a word many Zennies use to define or describe their practice, since gratitude implies there is someone or something one is grateful to, and Zennies tend to remain silent on questions of theology.

Zen practitioners tend to emphasize what we do when we meditate: we sit upright with eyes lowered, hands in a mudra below our navels, and attention fixed on our breath, a silent, repetitive mantra helping us keep that attention right here, right now. But this description of what a Zennie does when she meditates omits entirely the question of what she feels when she sits and follows her breath. And in my case, I can on most days answer that question with only one word: gratitude.

The gratitude I feel when I meditate isn’t a hearts-and-flowers feeling, and it’s not something that involves the counting of blessings or anything that could be expressed succinctly in a thank-you note. Instead, it is a deep abiding sense of contentment that simmers beneath the sturm-und-drang of consciousness. On the surface, I might be happy, sad, anxious, or impatient, and my thoughts might be entirely subsumed with the static and distracted chatter of the day’s headlines, to-dos, and petty quarrels. But beneath that turbid roil of thoughts–down at the bedrock of consciousness–a single stream runs clear and pure. That is what I mean by the word “gratitude.”

The gratitude that bubbles up when I meditate has nothing to do with turkeys, football games, or cranberry sauce. Instead, it is a deep and enduring realization that this present moment is enough. Watching my breath go out and in, I become deeply aware of the precious connectedness of this one individual life. My gratitude (if I must call it that) goes out to all the joined-but-disparate things in the vast wide universe that make this moment possible: family, friends, and loved ones, to be sure, but also the earth and trees and shadows and air. If I had to count my blessings, I’d have to count the entire Universe of existence, from smallest microbe to most distant star.

Such talk, of course, will earn you plenty of odd looks at the family dinner table, and that is why I’m secretly relieved every year when the public pomp of Thanksgiving Day is done and I can get back to the serious business of admiring stars and shadows in secret.

 

By heart and by foot

Last week J and I had Thanksgiving dinner at the Top of the Hub, just as we did last year. One of the things I’m grateful for is the place we live: Newton is a sleepy suburb of Boston, so it’s a quick trip into the city for culture and back home for quiet.

When I lived in New Hampshire, I told myself I’d move back to Boston in a heartbeat if I could afford a way to live there, and some ten years later I find myself living just outside a city I loved at first sight. I can’t overstate the amazement I feel whenever I realize how far I’ve come from my childhood in Columbus, Ohio. Ohio, I sometimes say half-ironically, is a great place to be from; Boston, on the other hand, is a place other folks go to. Hailing from flyover country, I still feel like pinching myself when realize I live in a city other people visit on vacation.

Thanksgiving Day was gray and drizzly, so after J and I parked on a holiday-empty Back Bay side-street, we walked directly to the Prudential Center, window-shopping the indoor mall there before heading to the Skywalk Observatory on the 50th floor. Viewed from above, Boston is a crowded tangle of streets and sidewalks: “How could people ever live there,” I can imagine newcomers wondering. But when I lived in a basement apartment in Beacon Hill more than a decade ago, Boston was entirely livable, a place I knew by heart and by foot.

Looking at Boston from above is like looking at a map, and when I look at maps of Boston, I invariably juxtapose my own muscle-memories of walking these streets and sidewalks. Here along the Charles is the Esplanade where I’d sit in the sun and write letters home, there is the Public Garden where I’d watch skulking ovenbirds and warblers before heading to campus, and over there is the Christian Science reflecting pool, where I’d spend a quiet moment on my way from the Boston Public Library.

Most maps include a marker that says “You Are Here,” but the map that is Boston viewed from above reminds me where I was and were I came from: the long, winding route that led me here and all the places I’ve been along the way. I couldn’t tell you if I tried how to drive in Boston, since I didn’t have a car when I lived there. But I can tell you how to navigate the T and how to avoid being jostled on crowded sidewalks, and I remember with eyes closed the secret shortcuts only locals know.

 

On top of the world

This year for Thanksgiving, J and I had dinner at the Top of the Hub, located on the 52nd floor of the Prudential Center in downtown Boston. Before we sat down to dinner, we strolled around the Skywalk Observatory, which offers a 360-degree bird’s eye view of Boston, Cambridge, and the outlying suburbs.

Life really does come into perspective when you see it from above, passing pedestrians and looming landmarks looking equally small and inconsequential. “Look at that guy trying to parallel park,” one woman whispered to her husband, and yes, directly below us there was an unfortunately-angled car trying unsuccessfully to squeeze into a parking spot on Boylston Street.

At street level, trying to park in downtown Boston is a Big Deal; from 50 stories up, it’s the stuff of comedy. Sometimes all it takes to see your life from another perspective is an elevator ride and a taste of pumpkin creme brulee from 50 stories up.