Giving Thanks.

The theme this year was burlap and wheat.  Tactile, scratchy.  It irritated the skin, the colors were mute.  The vase full of weeds and blooms were foraged on the morning walk.  There were sprigs of rosemary in jars, next to the salt.  For garnish and for earthiness.  For authenticity, for aromatics.  Rosemary steeped in hot water can speed recovery.  I think we can all use a little of that.  The table was beautiful, simple and connected.  It was crowded.  The windless day would sigh a breeze, and the grapevine would rustle slightly.  It was alive.  Every moment was electric in that brick and mortar kitchen.  We ate outside. It's hard to reflect, I get lost in my thoughts.  i'm like Narcissus, lost in that reflection.  Thanksgiving is hard for me, it seems silly sometimes.  I never appreciated my parents; I still don't, fully.  When I was young, my mother would stay in her bathrobe until three, when the turkey was done, and she'd change into jeans and a black sweater.  Every year.  Every year, it was her formalware.  She cooked for seven hours, we'd be done in twenty minutes.  Never appreciated.  No one ever thanked her for her meal.  No one ever told her she was beautiful.  She told me she wore her pearls this Thanksgiving, the ones I got her last year.  The ones I bought in June, waiting, anticipating, happy to make her feel special.  And she did.  I am thankful she wore them, thankful she smiled as she clasp them around her neck, feeling beautiful and not having to cook for three ungrateful children.

I am thankful for my father, who tells me every day he loves me.  I reflect on the Thanksgiving I called him from Italy and told him he needed to send me more money.  He said the banks were closed and I hung up.  I ignored his emailing until I saw my bank account.  I'm thankful he was patient, patient in a way I know I couldn't be.  He loves me more than I realize.  It's jarring when you realize how one-sided that love is.  I'm thankful he's waiting for me to catch up, to appreciate him.  Appreciate the times he took me to school.  Every morning he'd buy me coffee and ask me about my day.  Most mornings, I was too asleep and too annoyed to answer back much.  Now, I want to go to the Legion and drink a beer with him.  Ask him how his life is.  Tell him I'm growing up and I love him, too.

I'm thankful.  I'm reflecting on this.  I was called ungrateful more than once in my youth, and I don't want to be that same asshole anymore.  I try to say thank you for everything.  It's difficult sometimes.  When you feel so deserving of love, and you still have to stop and realize that someone is willingly letting you have it.  Nothing is for free.  I've given it my all this year.

There were five of us for Thanksgiving, and I cooked for everyone.  I did it out of love, as a challenge to see if I could.  I wrote it all down on paper and used our neighbor's oven as a back-up.  I roasted vegetables and thought about terms like umami and emulsify.  I've grown a lot as a cook, and today I wrote down all the things I could do with pasta.  I've seen a change in me, and I like it.  I'm thankful for that.

And I'm thankful for friends.  I grew up lonely, and it's a human condition I can't shake.  I laughed with friends and called more that evening, we made dinner and I wrote little Thank-You cards, totems of gratitude for sticking around.  Sometimes I can be desperate, I'm always playing aloof and then begging for love.  But we ate around candlelight, drank the red when we ran out of white, and created a small family that night, and I'm thankful for that trust.

Thanksgiving is not the hand-traced turkey holiday of my childhood, it's not that line drawn in the proverbial sand between autumn and "The Holiday Season" where it's more appropriate to have a Christmas tree up.  It's is living, breathing, steeping yourself in that gratitude and calling your parents, saying you love them.  Saying you'll change every year a little bit and love them forever.  Loving everything a little harder next year.  Nothing is for free.  I've given it my all this year.

Here are some pictures of the table and our guests...

  

North Carolina, pt. 3

There are genetic tests through hair samples to map out every single place you've ever been.  There are new studies that show that starvation and trauma-induced depression and psychosis can be hereditary through small changes in RNA that is outside of the genome--the essence of you.  Every roadmap we trace our little fingers on, every winter your mother stayed under the covers and  forgot your birthday, everything the genome forgot to tell you, it's all built on experience. I thought about this when we finally found my brother's house.  Blinking back the sunlight, seeing the church my brother would be married in four days' time.  I thought about what moments changed me so greatly the RNA inhibited growth in certain genes:  The hatred I felt when I came out.  The deafening silence I felt when I banged my head on the church altar the night my mother told me my uncle died in Afghanistan.  The detached realization that I wouldn't make the funeral because I was in Italy studying art.  The summers I spent as a child, screaming into a locked closet door while my brother was on the other side with the key.  Those experiences changed me molecularly, cellularly.  I dreaded reliving those moments in the silence, how each pause or lull in conversation could be interpreted as resentment.

Really, truly, the only thing I resented was not learning how to forgive when i needed to most.

And I did.  I forgave in a way that was unlike my grudge-harboring self.   I forgave my aunts and uncles for the unspoken words as they greeted me with beer at Nag's Head.  I forgave my sister for all the foolish adolescent arguments we still held onto and we opened up to each other on the three hour ride to the beach.  I forgave my grandfather for calling me the wrong name on the phone after not talking to me for five years.  I forgave, I forgave, and I forgave.  And I smiled and lost sunglasses (and found them at the bottom of the tides).   Sometimes it was overwhelming, sometimes it was organic.  And each time we made promises to keep in touch, we knew it was never going to happen.  But, it was the clarity of knowing where our weaknesses lie that made it all the more real to make those promises.  It was a gossamer veil of a relationship that was just a little too transparent for all of us.  In the periphery of our embraces, we could all sense the charade.

I still have not received the phone calls I was promised.  I am still the stubborn boy I was before I left and need proof of their love before I give in and make the first call.  But, at least now I know my family.  And I understand my mother and know her as an adult now.  We drank four nights straight and laughed for five.  We hugged tight at the airport and I knew it was different each time I said goodbye, how the promise of seeing her again all depended on schedules and airline prices and her progressive arthritis.  But she opened up to me, found comfort in my understanding her ways, and held her hand in the silence on the way to the airport.  The windows stayed down and my grandfather's pipe formed tails of smoke motes that floated between our heads.

I wear a Piggly Wiggly shirt that we bought together almost every night to bed.

But it was not just my mother I got to know better, not just my relatives whom I'll drift away from casually and expectantly again.  I got to relive all the moments of high school with Carissa, experienced new ones and solidified our friendship with a tattoo.  We dedicated it permanently, and it's a perfect emblem of our relationship.  A small outline of a hummingbird sit on my right shoulder, hers on her back.  The edges on mine have blurred a little, but it's permanent nonetheless.  There's a metaphor in there somewhere, a poem about us I can't write just yet.

But, I never had a moment alone with my brother.  A moment to be the best man I was elected to be.  He helped me with my corsage and that was it.  In silence, he handed me a card that thanked me for coming out and I hugged him in an awkward, obligatory way.  I do not know his wife, Jennie, and I kept my distance.  They have their house in North Carolina and their jobs as teachers, their dog and toy collection, their bedroom in their attic.  They are building a life together, they went diving in the Florida Keys together.  I don't need to disrupt a harmony I had no part of.  I kept my distance.  I'll always keep my distance with him, and it's understood and not forced anymore between us.  It's comfortable, and that's relieving.

But in all those moments as the trip wore down, each second I took to remember where I was and whom I was talking to, I never forgot that I have a life in California.  A life no one can relate to, but old women in the church basement will ask if you know so-and-so, who may have visited there in 1973.  You know they mean well, but they know nothing about you and expect you to know everything about them. Now I am a scatterplot of triumphs and failures that have somehow formed this version of myself that's at once cynical and optimistic, serious and the performer.  I'm transitioning between two worlds and constantly having to remind myself that I physically am not in Pennsylvania anymore, that I cannot hold my mother's hand again for another six months.  That those laughs were not promised like they used to be.  To look each person in the eyes and mean it when you say you love them.  I have learned these things through mistakes and I could write a million vignettes about my week in North Carolina, but none of them were as important as that lesson.

North Carolina, pt. 2

I can be pensive when I need to be, to appear intelligent and aloof.  I can do this as protection or for show, a drag I perform to keep myself entertained on the long flights and the short layovers.  I play this game and wonder who think I'm interesting.  In the liminal spaces of airport terminals, everyone wants to be an image of God, someone you'll clutch and pray to when the seatbelt sign flashes, when turbulence hits, when the seat has to remain in an upright position. I feel the same way about friends.  Who will crash with me? Who will share their mask and let me breathe with them?  So few people have met those standards, so few have tried.  My circle of friends used to be loose and crocheted, a yarn of commonality from being bored in the same area code.  Now, the scatterplot characters I call friends are in timezone drifts and desert plains, in metropolitan cities with crime rates and county fairs.  As you get older, you begin to lessen the load, streamline the birthday cards to remember, the gifts to buy.  The secrets you once told the room now remain between you, God, your teddy bear, and a friend.  Whoever will listen rather than opine, whoever will not judge.

I have this in my friend, Carissa.  I have this on a level unsurpassed by any other person I've met.  We hugged tight in her car as she pulled up to greet me at the airport.  She handed me fried chicken, we went to Taco Bell.  A relationship built on unashamed enjoyment of dollar menus and drive-throughs, stopping at a fast food restaurant is intrinsic to our friendship.  It's in the DNA of who we both have become together because there is no pretense, no need for customs and waiters.  We are happy to substitute a napkin for a shirt sleeve, we are happy to laugh at ourselves and who we have become.

After, we drove to her apartment, in a suburb of Philadelphia.  In a two-bed-two-bath, with high ceilings and broken bar stools.  I slept on the couch, the air conditioning turned on to combat the insidious humidity that unapologetically clings to your body like static.  There was no getting rid of the heat, and I was introduced to it in Philadelphia.

And the next morning, when I dropped Carissa off at work to have her car for the day, I stripped my sweaty shirt off and sat for a while in the parking lot of her complex, marveling at the greenery and the way birds sang higher notes.  Beads formed, breath shortened, and I followed the familiar zigzag of hallways that led to her doorstep.  I drank the rest of my gas station coffee and found every movement of mine echoing in her airy apartment.  I had time to think, to relax, to hear myself and my opinions.  I had time, for the first time in a long time.

So I cleaned her apartment.  I did the dishes and folded blankets.  I put laundry away and wiped my spit from the sink.  I did it because I wanted to show I loved her in a way she wouldn't expect.  I like to be kept busy, and I'm good at distracting myself from myself.  The echoes were almost too loud, they drowned out the birdcalls I loved so much.

When it was time to pick up Carissa, we headed towards Richmond, Virginia, the overnight stop on our way to Pinetops, North Carolina.  We shot down lanes, followed banks and rivers.  We covered more mileage in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed than I had in years.  We stocked up on snacks, and stopped once to buy lottery tickets outside of Baltimore.  Carissa drove the whole way and I watched her lips move in the cold blue hues of her dashboard as we sang along to the radio.  It was a night when the water made the air cold and we fogged up the windows from laughing at ourselves.

We checked into a Microtel that had bulletproof glass and slept in a queen-sized bed, waking up five hours later to pull into my brother's driveway by nine the next morning.