This morning I awoke to the house at rest, a house that somehow held 22 people for a sit-down Thanksgiving dinner yesterday.
An outside table was pulled in, borrowed chairs were tucked under it, and the best china was pulled from its sleeves, dusted off and actually used.
Today, I could do some Black Friday shopping, I could catch up with classwork …. or, I could do what I most want to do, which is to look out my office window at clouds scudding across the sky.
It’s 9 on a Thanksgiving morning and for once I remembered to turn on the TV in time to catch the parade from the beginning. It will be on in the background as the dust flies, the turkey roasts and the potatoes boil.
But the big story for most of us this year will not be on a screen. It will be in living rooms and family rooms and kitchens across the nation.
It will be when we rub shoulders, click glasses and — dare I say it? — hug each person who enters our home. For the big story this Thanksgiving is that we’re celebrating it together.
Vincent Van Gogh
The Van Gogh immersive experience begins as soon as you walk in the door and are greeted with a wall of sunflowers, or, I should say, a larger-than-life Van Gogh-like depiction of them. A few steps away is a bust of the painter that morphs from black and gray shadows to the swirled blues and lavenders of his flowers.
You pass a re-creation of the room at Arles, complete down to the washstand and window and hat hanging from a peg on the wall. Take a photo of the room and you’ve created a masterpiece.
There are videos on the artist’s life, his hospitalization, self-mutilation and eventual suicide. And there is music: Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, something by Debussy, others I couldn’t place, all soaring and emotive.
But the best is saved for last, when you walk into the final gallery and find yourself a part of the paintings. You stand or sit or recline on the floor while the art comes alive around you, pages slide off easels, stars explode in the night, and a hundred sunflowers bloom against a lapis lazuli sky.
With Halloween and All Saints Day behind us, we come one again to a more humble celebration in the liturgical calendar: All Souls, the day set aside each year to honor the dead. Not just the famous or the pious but everyone.
That’s a lot of souls. According to the Population Reference Bureau, about 109 billion. And every one of them once a life, a presence, a story.
I don’t know about you, but this day feels more sacred to me than all the others.
Yesterday, my neighborhood rolled out all the stops for a Halloween parade and party, complete with “Monster Mash” and other seasonal favorites blared over a loudspeaker attached to a slow-moving truck; a bouncing room for the little tykes; a haunted forest; and pizza and candy for all.
We saw baby pirates, glittering princesses; and a rumpled, white-wigged Einstein. My grandkids were a 50s-style greaser, a bumblebee and SpiderMan. It was chaotic and fun.
True, I never found the treasure trove of costumes that my own girls wore, many of them hand-made by their seamstress grandma. But those will undoubtedly show up soon, in plenty of time for me to lose them by next Halloween.
Yesterday there was another first birthday, this one for our precious granddaughter, Bernadette. There were presents and cake and a special meal, a trip to the park with her mom and a visit with her grandparents and aunts and cousin.
But the big present was still to come. She was going to meet it (him!) right after she and her mom left us at 8 p.m. That would be her new brother, age 11, arriving with his dad on a plane from Benin, West Africa via Istanbul.
A year and two days ago, Suzanne and Appolinaire were a family of two. Now … they’re a family of four. We’re all rejoicing for them.
When I visited Lexington last month, Phillip drove me through the University of Kentucky campus. He wanted to show me that the twin towers were gone. Not those twin towers, though Phillip saw those come down, too. He was working in New York at the time, his office less than two miles north on Hudson. But it was the absence of the Kirwan-Blanding Towers he wanted to show me, two 23-floor dormitories that housed students for almost 50 years and that came down carefully, a floor at a time.
In the days and weeks that followed 9/11, I cooked up a storm. I made bacon-and-egg breakfasts, chopped vegetables for stews and soups. I drug out the crockpot and pressed it into service. I was making food for the bereaved and serving it to my family. It felt like a way to heal.
But that was long ago. Our problems have metastasized. The terrorism is still present but now we also have a pandemic, climate change disasters, and an ignominious end to the war we started to avenge the 9/11 attacks. So many challenges … and so little consensus on how to deal with them.
Ten years ago, I wrote that our children grew up in a different world. Now my children have children. What kind of world will they inherit?
It’s my first Labor Day without a paid, full-time job to return to the next day. Does it feel different? Strangely enough, not much. I’ve known for a long time that what drives me is more internal than external.
So there will be no 8 a.m. start time, no Tuesday 1 p.m. meeting — but there will be a to-do list — reading to finish, a class to attend, an appointment. And then there are the everyday tasks, the ones I don’t have to list: writing, walking, posting here.
It has me thinking — what is labor, anyway? And what is leisure?
“Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do,” said Mark Twain.
But sometimes a body enjoys what it is obliged to do so much that it doesn’t seem like work. And now that my working life has changed, I realize that to make it full and rich I must insert tasks that I’m not obliged— and am maybe even afraid — to do. Is that labor? Is it leisure?
On this sunny Labor Day, with a light breeze rifling the papers on my outside “desk” (the glass-topped table) … I say, who cares?
For a day that will end with the splashing of light across a night sky, that would if I were close enough to it, also include loud pops and bangs (but which will not since I’ll be viewing the fireworks from a ridge across the Potomac) … it is starting out calmly and quietly.
Bluebirds have been flitting between the neighbor’s yard and ours, their cerulean wings flashing out against the green grass of the yard, which backgrounds the birds when they perch on the chicken wire that now encloses the garden.
The deck, cleaned of the dried bamboo fronds that usually litter it this time of year, is blown clean and fresh. The air is cool, not yet humid.
It is a lovely, calm Sunday morning, a time to pause, reflect and enjoy.
At my house, the longest day passed in a blur of baby giggles, burgers and corn on the cob. Not the most elegant Father’s Day repast, but one suited to young families.
These days are golden, and when the last toy is collected and stuffed into the diaper bag, and the cars disappear down the street, I’m left marveling, as I always do, at how our family has grown.
It will always be miraculous to me, which is, I suppose, how it should be.
