 |
||||||||
 |
|
|||||||
|
||||||||
|
 |
A tradition of thanks loses layer of insulation
© St. Petersburg Times, It is a little early, I know, but this is the last column I will be writing between now and Thanksgiving, and I wanted to get in the mood early. As a nation, we probably have not approached any holiday in anything approaching a similar mood in the past 50 or 51 years (there was Christmas, yet, to go on Dec. 7, 1941), and I don't know if we, or at least I, have lost the touch of wanting more and being thankful for less. Some would see it as difficult, in a country at war and with a bruised and battered economy, to relax into some warm fuzzy cranberry-flavored holiday glow and feel that all is well with us and with the world. But the truth is that all seldom has been well, and it was only the degree to which we have been insulated from that truth that has let us think, for a day, that full stomachs and football were the proper gauges of satisfaction, security and safety. The experience of war some 35 years ago taught me, if nothing else, the art of being thankful for what others would consider to be not much. I can be thankful that I can have, any time I want it, a glass of cool, clear, drinkable water and can, in fact, have as many as I want. I can, with the flick of a switch, change the climate in which I am living and, even in Florida, am relatively protected from insects. I am thankful that I haven't pulled a leech off my body in the past 24 hours (or 35 years, for that matter) and that nobody has seriously tried to kill me during that period. I'm not here to tell war stories but to note that a good portion of the world's inhabitants live all or part of their lives in similar circumstances and don't even get the chance to know anything different. Watching a CNN tape of a 7-year-old Afghan child laboring 12 hours per day in a blacksmith's shop in hopes that he, someday, will be able to afford the slightly better level of poverty that a blacksmith enjoys in that war-shredded country was interesting, especially when juxtaposed against a monotonous background of new computer toys, $100 sneakers and $90 designer T-shirts -- commercials that, ironically, pay for our glimpses into that less fortunate world. Luxury and safety and comfort are always relative. American kids will go to bed tonight, and Thursday night, with empty stomachs. I still go to bed with the memory of the 8-year-old daughter of a friend of mine who, when her mother moved her out of a high-crime neighborhood, couldn't sleep because the lack of gunshots, domestic battles and sirens made it too uncannily quiet for her. For the first time in our history, thousands of immediate family members of U.S. civilian war dead will look at a holiday of thankfulness wondering how to manifest it, and at a holiday season of peace while living with the intimate knowledge of how fragile that peace is and how suddenly it can disappear. My family, the living example of dysfunctionality, has few traditions. We used to go in for drunken holiday screaming matches based on cherished grudges nourished for decades, but death has thinned our ranks (in fact, I am now the patriarch on one side). I can't remember one of 15 Thanksgivings I spent at home ever involving any discussion of thankfulness for anything except when one of the more obnoxious combatants left or went to bed. The closest thing to a tradition I remember was that we always had canned cranberry sauce. I once rejected the real thing at a restaurant because it wasn't served cylindrically and didn't have the imprints of the can interior on it. The other tradition was that whoever was cooking dinner, for reasons apparently related to predinner entertainment, invariably forgot the cranberry sauce, bringing it to the table at the last moment asking people already unbuttoning their pants, if they wanted any. I always did because there was something about the flavor. The sauce was sweet but had an edge of tart bitterness, and, even then, I had a feeling that that was what life was going to be like.
 © 2006 • All Rights Reserved • St. Petersburg Times
490 First Avenue South • St. Petersburg, FL 33701 • 727-893-8111 
|
|
Times columns today Jan Glidewell John Romano From the Times North Suncoast desks |
