Remembering Thanksgiving Days Past

What have we to be thankful for today? Let’s start with being alive … not all of us are of course. Any manner of diseases that are slowly eating the moments and minutes from the lives of loved ones and others with no one standing at their bedsides. Thankful for life mainly.

We can be grateful for our families … for most of us. There are families so estranged from one another, they only exist on paper — birth and death certificates

Thankful there are 28 days of loud, pushy and expensive Christmas shopping days left! Yea.

Since Thanksgiving of 1975, this particular holiday has been a mixed bag of emotions for me. I sat in the mess hall at Marine Corps Airstation Yuma, in Yuma, Arizona, with that tray full of Thanksgiving dinner — which on a whole, was well prepared and very good — and looked out at the hundreds of other Marines (and other military personnel) sitting down to a very noisy Thanksgiving Banquet, Marine Corps style.

At that moment, I had a profound sense of sadness, grief even, that I wasn’t home with my family. The next nine years of hard drinking could never fill that deep hole that planted itself in my heart. From then on This holiday was just another day and yes, I would take part in the meal, with all its banter, laughter and joyfulness, ever remembering that hole … “remembering” isn’t the right word because I never chose to feel it. There was that year I spent Thanksgiving as Sergeant of the Guard and stood duty on Thanksgiving. I was okay with that. Listening to Armed Forces Radio, walking around our area checking the walking posts as they “missed” Thanksgiving with me.

Over the years, since I first became clean and sober in 1984 (September 30), I’ve begun to have an understanding that there is a lot for which I can be grateful — thankful — for every day of the year, 365 days in a row, repeat. It took time to develop.

These past 41 years-plus haven’t been without growth and the growing pains that come with it. People I’ve hurt and the pain of my broken self, mental emotional and physical, trying to repair and heal. It didn’t — and doesn’t — come in one day with one stroke of the pen. Frustration quickly turned to anger can just as quickly turn my thoughts and feelings to burning ash and, for just a moment these past few years my mood feels dark and pitiful.

Then I remember to accept the things I cannot change and the serenity that it brings, change the things I can, starting with my outlook on life, at this moment and hopefully, the wisdom to know the difference.

It’s a difficult task to do remember, let alone perform, every moment from every day of ever year. Who has the time! Reminds me of the movie The Matrix: Reloaded (2003) the second of the series and arguably the best of the three … err … four. When the three human warriors proceed to visit the Merovingian to get the Key Maker. The Frenchman says, “Who has time? Who — has — time? But then, if we do not ever take time, how can we ever have time?”

That’s a short clip. The Merovingian is a frustrating and selfish character. This next clip is the meat of the scene.

I’m thankful and grateful for YouTube, even though it is part of a huge, uncontrolled corporate machine.

Now I can visit things I’ve experienced from so many decades ago that not only allows me to remember, but feel special moments in my past.

As mentioned earlier, I was Sergeant of the Guard in November of 1977. I don’t remember what day it was, could have been around the holiday, I was listening to Armed Forces Radio again and two songs came on, one after the other, with no DJ banter separating them: “Desperado” by The Eagles and “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me,” by Elton John and Bernie Taupin.

I love that version with George Michael, one of the best voices of his generation.

But there I was, with a transistor radio plugged into my ears — pre-Bluetooth earbuds — listening to this music, staring out at a very dark jungle on the other side of a fence, believing some sort of spirit, a great coming together of the six senses to give me — ME — two songs to assuage the melancholy of my thoughts, my soul.

They spoke to me that night, like few songs or performances ever have. Today these two songs have a deep, warm place in my heart. Not just melancholy, but gratitude as well. I smile when listening to them, especially back-to-back.

That’s what it meas to me, at least, to be in the military on holidays, hundreds or thousands of miles from home, having these private moments we never share — until we do.

The world goes on without us, or so it seems, but from personal experience, when my brother Carl was in the U.S. Navy, going to Vietnam on occasion, and me going to mess halls or standing guard duty, I know my family had missed me on the holidays, at least as much as I missed them and probably more.

The world never did go on without me, at least not those for whom I held close in my thoughts. For those loved ones, the world never went on without me, without my brother Carl and the rest of my relatives off somewhere, away from the family.

Today is different, change — growth — has taken place, with all its resulting growing pains. I can smile and enjoy this day, making a Thanksgiving meal for four — my buddy John, who contributes quite a bit to this preparation, and our two furry companions — Chica and Jackson Brown Bear.

Our two examples of how to live in the moment with unconditional love; that is what they contribute to our holidays. It’s no coincidence I started to really understand when first Chica came to our home and then little Jackson. He’s a good boy.

Gratitude … For what am I grateful each and every day: Loved ones, starting with family and the closest friends, including Jax and Chica, my other good friends, many of whom I have known for 10-plus, 20-plus, 30-plus, 40-plus years or longer — Tony and Ken my brothers and Mary Lou my older sister. And the four siblings that passed before this day: Carl, Cheryl, Rick and Elaine.

So much love radiates from my memories. Mom and Dad, the same. Cousins, aunts and uncles, then these dear friends, so many to remember, both from San Diego, where I now live, and Milwaukee, from where I came, plus everything and everyone in between.

But this brings up the elephant, or should I say the Sacred White Buffalo, in the room. The Indigenous peoples of this land, North America and quite possibly, likely the Indigenous people of the Hawaiian Islands, the Marianas Islands , the Solomon Islands — especially the Solomons —  Alaska and who knows where else, consider this holiday as a day of mourning.

The story we were told about that first “Thanksgiving” was B.S. From the moment Christopher Columbus stepped off his longboat onto Hispaniola, and then the Pilgrims on Plymouth Rock. The nations that had been living here before the Europeans did have been under assault. To paraphrase Malcolm X, They didn’t land on Plymouth Rock, Plymouth Rock landed on them.

Of course Malcolm was speaking specifically about the slaves who were tortured on a journey from Africa to the “new world” by European (primarily) slavers, brutally forced into hard labor in the most unspeakable conditions.

We have (We wish) … a free and diverse society here in the U.S.A. The convicted felon and his MAGA Cult may want to believe Diversity, Inclusion and Equality are bad, anti-American traits of socialism, but those three ideals, realities in some cases, are at the core of our Founding Documents, even though they were decidedly not at the core of a number of Founding Fathers.

So part of my meditation of and for Gratitude today includes love, understanding and contrition for the evil perpetrated on the Indigenous and African peoples that have been hurt, suffering for centuries under the greed of the European bots pushed down on their necks. And for all their descendants because for most of my life I’ve benefited from some of that injustice.  More will be revealed.

On this day though, I will be grateful and thankful  that I can enjoy this day with loved ones , just as I try to enjoy every day with the ones surrounding me. And grateful for the ones around me who mourn for what has been lost.

Happy Thanksgiving.