Our Thanksgiving Day Parade

Two turkeys -- one smoked, one deep fried, two stuffings -- one vegetarian, one not, two potatoes -- one sweet and one regular old. The Emeril's macaroni and cheese, the roasted vegetables, the salad, the cranberry mousse, the corn pudding. Butternut squash -- that was new this year. Thank goodness for the appetizers that tided us over, and the desserts to punctuate our annual gluttony.

It's been years since my cousin, Bruce, and I (and Lily, the beautiful golden retriever) met up for our Friday-morning-after-Thanksgiving run. At 71, he still looks as young, to me, as he did when he was the bearded, long-locked hippie on a motorcycle. My relatives, the men in particular,  are blessed with some odd youthful gene. Though I miss the crunch of the leaves on the hilly path, the icy cold November New England air, the weakening sun fully visible through the naked branches, my aching feet and rebellious stomach are thankful for the respite. I am happy to sit by the fire in the hotel eating a bagel and drinking coffee.

It's been years since I spent much of the day entertaining my own babies, hoping they would nap, worried they would interfere with everybody's feast or rub chocolate turkey remnants on my cousins' white couches. The crowd size has remained relatively constant, though with marriages and trips abroad and pregnancies and the occasional illness, attendance has fluctuated. I, for one, have never missed a Thanksgiving meal.

My cousins' home is filled with their grandchildren now, small humans with runny noses and leaky diapers and short attention spans and unfiltered emotions who somehow manage to steal my heart the moment we lock eyes. Each year, it seems, we add a new side dish, and a new person. There's always enough room on our plates for more.

It seems crazy, sometimes, the hoops we jump through to continue to convene somewhere in Connecticut every Thanksgiving, when most of us don't live anywhere near there. For eight hours (give or take, depending on unexpected cooking snafus), we flow from room to room reacquainting, catching up, looking for delicacies that may never have made it to the big table in the living room, cousins we may have ignored. From one year to the next, everyone looks pretty much the same. When I pause, though, and think back on the 24 year tradition, I can't quite reconcile the baby cousins I remember so vaguely with the doting parents they have become. Then there are my babies who are, quite suddenly, adults. My once chubby cheeked son who joins us these days via Facetime from Japan, his hair still matted with sleep and his eyes still bleary. If I close my eyes, I can still hear my father's voice, my aunt's, my uncle's. My mother is still young, still beautiful, can still hear.

We come for the turkeys and the potatoes and the apps and the pies.  Okay, no we don't. But it's nice to know the feast will always be there, to join us.

The New Math

An elderly gentleman walked by the table where I celebrated my birthday with friends, and handed me a two dollar bill. I felt uncomfortable, accepting money from anybody, but I thanked him profusely and tucked the bill in my wallet, right next to the torn half of a twenty dollar bill I've carried around for years.

A two dollar bill is, theoretically and actually, worth two dollars. No more, no less. But it is not the same. Combined into a single greenback, this two dollars will buy me nothing, but it will acquire and retain immeasurable value as it remains, crisp as the day I received it, in my wallet. It will trigger memories of a celebration with friends, of a carefree evening, of a random and unexpected act of generosity by a stranger. It will be, too, a small safety net, always there if I am penniless and desperate, say, for a diet Coke from the McDonald's drive-thru.

My half-twenty is decidedly less valuable, worth nothing unless, of course, it is reunited with its other half. Not bloody likely. Sure, it triggers memories of long ago celebrations with friends and random acts of, if not generosity, recklessness, but I would never presume to pass it off as something of value. It is worth less, certainly, than my new two dollar bill, less even than two -- or ten -- of the crumpled singles buried deep in the pocket of an old coat, or collecting crumbs in the bowels of my purse. It is equivalent to, at best, a lump of coal.

We are living in an age of false equivalencies, a world in which human beings might no longer be viewed as equal but bad behavior is, no matter how egregious or how often repeated, depending on your side of the aisle. Suffice it to say that I think 45's history of sexual assaults, though appalling, are not, by any stretch of the imagination, the reason he should not be president. It is, more broadly, his contempt for norms, his contempt for the law, his contempt for basic decency that make him uniquely unqualified. (Not to mention his ignorance and lack of experience.) This is not to say that I am in favor of forced kisses or uninvited touching in any situation -- be it a frat house or the halls of Congress or any place in between. Not by a long shot.

I hope that the result of the exploding "me too-ism" will be re-education -- of girls, and boys, and employers, and employees, and politicians, and constituents. I hope that the result will not be wasteful side shows and disproportionate punishments and the re-prosecution and re-litigation of past wrong doing. Some lines can never be crossed -- pedophilia and abuse of power spring to mind -- but with the floodgates now thrown open for all sorts of painful revelations, it is time to look forward, and to advocate policies that are color blind, gender blind, economic status blind, and, most importantly, politically blind.

I am about as likely to spend the crisp two dollar bill as I am to attempt to pass the half twenty off as a ten. But I take some comfort in knowing it's there, and that if I really need to, I can. That, to borrow a phrase from The Indigo Girls, is the power of two.

Chase all the ghosts from your head

I'm stronger than the monster beneath your bed

Smarter than the tricks played on your heart

We'll look at them together then we'll take them apart

Adding up the total of a love that's true

Multiply life by the power of two.

Indigo Girls, Power of Two

Global Repositioning Systems

It's not easy being judgmental -- and I omit, here, the handful of adjectives and expletives and other parts of speech that once embellished that description of me. Speaking from years of experience, those of us who tend toward the eye roll simply assume that everyone else is returning the favor -- or lack of favor, as the case may be. Could it be that nobody ever really knows what to do? That we judge just to reassure ourselves we are okay?

Yesterday, I ran into an acquaintance from my yoga days. (I still do yoga, but I have become less convinced that you can breathe your way through pain, physical or psychic; especially when one of the walls in your preferred studio is filled with mirrors.) He is preparing for "chapter two," he told me. I judged immediately -- slow reader or, as the case may be, slow writer. We're about the same age, and I'm already dipping my toe into chapter four.

The last time we spoke, he was in a low key yogic kind of panic because his only son, who had long struggled with social issues, was about to apply to college. I had told him not to worry, that everything would work out. He had looked at me as if I had two heads. That was two years ago.

Yesterday, he had just returned from visiting that same son. For the first time, his grades have slipped -- (so what?), but he is surrounded by friends, and remarkably at ease -- (Hallelujah!). I could almost touch the relief on the guy's face, the botox-y effect of a job well done and a deep breath well-earned. Years of hard work and sleepless nights had paid off, and he was ready to move out of hiatus, continue his own story.  Chapter two. He even has it pretty much mapped out. What a fool. Okay, I am envious.

I suppose I never considered my child rearing years to be a hiatus, as I am far too selfish to have ever taken a complete break from myself. So that was my chapter two, and my chapter three began, I think, as my marriage disintegrated and my youngest child and I were left to navigate our own versions of "tween-dom" together. We are each, now, on the brink, one semester away from a frightening new phase. Without a map.

For the first time in more than two dozen years  -- a little less for her -- life will cease to be measured by academic calendars. The comfort of artificial closures and resets will be gone, and life will no longer be sectioned into manageable pieces. She will have to accustom herself to an existence that is not all that carefree. I will have to accustom myself to an existence that, while not carefree, is certainly less likely to revolve around the needs of others. I wish I could erase her fears, but I know I can't. I know how much she has to look forward to (if all goes the way it should, in life), but I know she has to figure that out for herself. As I need to, on my end.

Only minutes into a stroll down what seemed to be a well-defined path in the woods, the other day,  my friend and I got lost. As the crow flies, we were not far from where we needed to be, and there were plenty hours of sunlight left for us to figure it out, but still, it was a bit disorienting. Felled trees blocked our way in all directions, and muddy streams appeared out of nowhere. We both had different ideas about which way to go. Without judgment, we rejected my idea, then his, and chose what we both assumed was an illogical option. As it turns out, we had both been wrong, which, in my nasty habit of being judge-y, would make us fools and earn us failing grades in the navigation department. Oh, well.

Somehow, with a little leap of faith, we made it out of the woods.

Puttin' On the Pants Suit

I'd love to say my offer to kick in the extra 72 cents for the woman's coffee was motivated solely by a generous spirit, but I'd be lying. It was six-thirty in the morning, and her poor preparation was the only thing that stood between me and my coffee. It could have gotten pretty ugly, and 72 cents was a small price to pay.

Everything worked out. The woman looked relieved, the barista wouldn't let me take on the added expense (she claimed I've done it before, which I don't remember), and within a few moments I was on my way, leash in one hand and a hot off the presses Christmasy cup of caffeine in the other. Better still, I ran into the woman a few minutes later, as we were both pulled toward each other by our dogs. She told me she has been going through a really difficult time, and my kindness had made her day. I gave myself a partial pat on the back, knowing I had at least appeared to be kind and generous. With any luck, the road to heaven is paved with partially good intentions.

A year ago today, I woke up cautiously optimistic, determined to purchase a white pants suit to wear as I watched the election returns later that evening with friends. I had no illusions about Hillary's imperfections, and I was reluctant to count any chickens before they hatched, but in my wildest dreams I could not have imagined that, hours later, she would lose to the most unworthy of opponents. I have comforted myself, all year, with hopes that the nightmare would be short-lived. I have taken comfort, also, in knowing that, had Hillary won, her tenure would have been made miserable. We would never have had such a unique opportunity to learn, as a country, how toxic our brew of arrogance and ignorance and complacency could be.

Despite all my good intentions, I have expended far more energy on hand-wringing than I have on doing something to effect change. I have preached to my own choir, and I have refused to listen to other voices. I have failed to recognize, all too often, that despite a shitload of bad intentions at the highest levels, our road to hell, this year, has been paved by a fair share of equally well-intentioned opposing viewpoints.

Virginia came out yesterday, in the rain, to vote. Bigly. We all need to do the same. With my apologies to Billy Joel, sooner or later it just comes down to a lot more than faith. Time to put our 72 cents in every chance we get, whether its motivated by generosity of spirit or a faint, selfish hope that something good will eventually come of it. Even a random act of impatience can make someones day.