THE BONES OF THANKSGIVING AND DRIFTWOOD ERRATICS

The last month or so will now and forever be marked in my memory as Election-Thanksgiving Season.  It has left me both shaken and stirred. 

I am an emotional martini.

At least three times so far this Election-Thanksgiving season I watched The Searchers for comfort and grounding.  A scene features Mrs. Jorgenson (played by the late Harry Carey's widow, Olive), describing a "Texican" as "a human man, out on a limb."

She goes on to talk about this, her home place.  She notes that it will still be such, even after many bones are in the ground. 

Yes.  Election-Thanksgiving season rattled bones.

Election season: tidal, moon-pull, vast, blind man's bluff.   

Here is me at high tide:

I want to read your election posts and rants and finger wagging and I'm right there with you and I like you and sometimes heart you on social media.  I scroll down to find everyone's rants, posts, latest scriptures and morality plays.  I try to find some way of fitting in while privately resonating with some of the aspects of other views.   Is everybody okay with how I think?  I promise not to mention that I listen to the other side and think about that too.

Me at low tide:

You will not be hearing from me.  I don't plan to ever, ever log onto my computer again.  I'll duck in to pay my bills, duck out.  I'll play Words with Friends, but that's it.  I am not on a side and I am not following you or anyone, Anymore, Ever, Period, Amen. Privately, I feel lousy and worried that I'm taking full advantage of Life In America the Beautiful but I'm not pitching in properly (i.e. Taking A Strident Never Wavering Ever Stand and Blaring About It). 

While the election tide is shifting continuously, I feel lonely for my homeland.  Being an American, to me, used to feel like an exhilarating airplane ride over amber waves of grain.  Now, it feels like a shouting match in which nothing ever gets settled while everybody's everything and the house we all live in burns down.   

When the election was finally over (sort of), Thanksgiving loomed.  For me, since Ted died, that particular day is an awkward day of avoidance and unwelcome feelings of free-floating melancholy. 

Melancholy -- from the Greek -- literally meaning the remembrance of past pain.  It's the feeling of homelessness in my own home. 

Ted and I always parlayed the four free days off work we received for Thanksgiving with three vacation days to have nine days of beach time with the kids and dogs.  We traveled to Lincoln City, Oregon in all kinds of weather and threats of tidal driftwood injury.

Our Thanksgiving lasted a week and consisted of getting up, getting wet from frolicking, drying our clothes on the wood stove, watching waves from a window while eating Bugels or Cheetos, redressing, getting beach wet again, drying our clothes on the wood stove and going to bed.  Our cabin had no TV or radio.

Come Thanksgiving day, we ate at whatever place was open, be it KFC or pizza somebody.  Eventually, Safeway started selling pre-cooked fixings and we moved a little closer to Norman Rockwell.  Feral cats hauled our turkey carcass under the house while we watched, transfixed and thankful to be chilled to the bone.

The best years were the ones during which we narrowly missed being marooned on the cave side of a huge rock formation, or almost lost a limb or two or worse to tide-shifting driftwood from Asia.  Ted was supremely confident of his family's resilience and strength and never worried.  My mind was always crafting what I was going to say to the authorities when the investigation began.

My kids are grown now, with families of their own.  Without Ted, without kids to herd, without the thrill of dancing around salt water moving erratic driftwood, I have no more idea about how to deal with Thanksgiving than a porcupine does a Barbie doll.  I'm prickly all day and I don't want to be with others.  And yet, I feel a longing for my family and feel like a lost pilgrim.  This year, I wound up at a combination Thanksgiving and birthday party for a friend that had some family members present. 

Actually, the Thanksgiving meal and birthday party combo suited me just fine.  I was with people I am keen on, with kids making noise and breaking things.  Next year, however, I may go back to Lincoln City for the week.  I want to get in my car and make a long drive, with the wonderful emotion of homefulness creeping up on me and expanding along the way.   

Homefulness is that feeling we get when our plane lands on home soil, or we are finally arrived after a long time away.  The feeling of being in home's way is both the journey and the arriving.  To think of seeing one's people again, the embrace of someone we long for and love.  Someone who understands us, our idiosyncrasies and sensibilities.

The way I feel about my home in Edmonds and the way I feel about traveling to Lincoln City are the same.  I am channeling Mrs. Jorgenson.  Spiritually speaking, I have bones in both places.

There have been years since Ted's death when my family and I did orchestrate a rendezvous on the Oregon Coast for Thanksgiving.  Why do I ever try to do differently?  I do like to try new things.  I even like to resurrect old failings and try again.  Einstein called that insanity.

Perhaps there is a yearning that occasionally stirs wild in me to be more like the Norman Rockwell vision of family and home.  Where does such a notion spring from?

I blame the Election-Thanksgiving season. This season in particular held out the long, long table with abundant and beautifully turned food spread out before us.  Or perhaps it is just for some of us. 

Perhaps this is the Thanksgiving I discover I am not a pilgrim for Norman.