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The Column: 11.18.24

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Man has almost unlimited power to do damage and cause suffering, as we have been learning lately, and some slight power to do good, but as we grow up and pay attention to our surroundings, we see that we are beneficiaries of great gifts for which we can claim no credit, and so we have a day of thanksgiving in November, just as we’re bracing for winter. My aunt Eleanor was the patron saint of Thanksgiving and rented a nearby Legion hall and organized a dinner for a hundred or more Keillors back when I was a kid, before cellphones, so instead of taking selfies we had conversation.

My aunts told stories about the farm and how Grandpa drove a horse-drawn mower to cut hay with the reins in one hand and a book in the other and the day the house burned down and he raked through the ashes looking for photographs and how he drove home with his first Model T Ford and lost control of the car and pulled back on the wheel yelling “Whoa!” as the car slid into the ditch and he sat in it laughing at himself.

I am thankful for those big reunions and for my aunt’s friendship. I live in New York now and have a 1920 photograph on the wall of Grandpa walking down the road with my ten-year-old dad on one side and tiny Eleanor on the other. I am grateful for my first-grade teacher, Estelle Shaver, who kept me after school to reach aloud to her as she corrected workbooks. It was remedial reading but she made it seem like a privilege and I’ve felt privileged ever since.

For generations, women had the easy work of Thanksgiving, which was cooking the meal, and men had the hard job of making conversation. They sat in the living room with a football game on the TV, exchanging monosyllables after a fumble or a touchdown, as familiar smells drifted out of the kitchen where women told family secrets too shocking for men to handle. I’m okay with that.

I sit and stare at the screen watching men crash into each other and I’m grateful for cowardice: I never played football so now I don’t have the aches and pains that my heroic classmates have. I fooled around with drugs in college but they were cheap crummy drugs, not the powerful chemicals of today that lead a person to make a life sleeping in the park. I’m grateful that I was born late enough so that when I developed mitral valve problems, open-heart surgery was rather common so I didn’t die in my late 50s as two of my uncles did.

And I never was cursed with the sense of my own giftedness. People told me I was but I knew better. I have successfully avoided literary awards so I am not oppressed by my own eminence. Every morning I feel like a beginner.

So many blessings, and I haven’t even mentioned friendship, sunsets, public transportation, Christian hymnody, anti-seizure meds, other people’s toddlers, baseball, hearing aids, the steady thoughtful leadership of my wife, fluoridation, the Dairy Queen Heath Bar Blizzard, dental floss, my duet partner Heather Masse, the psalms of David, drip-grind coffee, cats, YouTube, trees, parks, rivers, the prairie, sonnets, Google, and cranberries.

Cranberries are the heart of Thanksgiving dinner. You don’t want a gourmet dinner that distracts you from your life blessings, so you serve turkey, a profoundly average dish. Every turkey dinner is about as good as any other turkey dinner. Same with pumpkin pie. But cranberries are terribly exciting. They are the Robert Frost of fruits, the Flaubert, the Frank Lloyd Wright, the Gabriel Fauré. You can overcook the turkey and serve a pumpkin pie that is just pudding with a crust, but if you serve cranberries you’re okay.

Be happy, my dears. America will soon see the return of the dopiest president in our history. Anyone who nominates Matt Gaetz to be Attorney General and Bobby Kennedy Jr. to be Secretary of Health needs GPS to show him the way to the bathroom, but keep this in mind: many of America’s cranberry growers voted for him and many people whose cranberry sauce has the power to make you stand on your tiptoes and yodel. Think about that for a moment. There is some good in all of us, maybe more than we know. And be happy on Thanksgiving.

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