Thanksgiving 2022

I don't really know what to say.  This is us, right?  Me, my mom, sister, and dad, circa 1980 or so. I think it was taken at my dad's brother's house down the street, around Christmas time.  I don't think any of us knew what we were doing.  We were lost in different moments of existence, and my face especially reveals that:  I'm clowning my disdain.  I'm doing a schtick next to my mom, probably because she just said to smile, or maybe that she loves me.  

I never really knew how to act outside of reacting. 

I don’t know how to put it.  I never felt comfortable.  I never felt like I could relate.  I never felt like I was there.   A part of things.  

There's no other way to verify these feelings outside of just saying I don’t really remember this day but I remember the feeling.  It's one that connects me to myself.  I feel alienated from most everything I am a part of.  It's just something I accept and try to use.  

So flash-forward to Thanksgiving 2022.   We go to see my dad.  He’s making us a big dinner in his condo in Anderson, Indiana, where we grew up.  I haven't seen him in like 21 years.  Life is always like that, right?  Shit happens and you think it's vitally important:  the schism is created based on that, the silence, but then suddenly you understand nothing matters anyway outside of the fact that he is old now, hell I'm old now, and life is what it is.

When we get there we just hug and he'd made ham and turkey and stuffing and potatoes and corn and green beans, and it's just that:  a dinner, with football on the TV.  Plus an added bonus:  3 crucially beautful little dogs also live in Dad's condo, and one, a little shaggy poodle, sits on a foot-stool like it is her throne, cuddling her own exclusive pink stuffed animal.  Like this is it, this is all I have ever needed.

Anderson, Indiana was a manufacturing town back when my sister and I were growing up.  Delco-Remy and Guide-Lamp were magic spells for a good living.  Now Anderson is a wasteland.  We drove past so many abandoned old houses it made us laugh out of shock and exhaustion.  Total devestation.  The sky was gray and overcast and there was this weird light that made things feel too close but also far enough away to give you vertigo.    

Going there emptied me out. 

Still it was worth it.  Just to understand myself a little better.  I actually love my life, and I love my family, but I don't understand any of it really anymore than I did when I was growing up.  And I probably won't ever figure most of it out.  The mystery is what allows you to continue.  Recognizing the mystery I mean.  I saw myself in my dad this time, a deep almost cozy empathy:  I know who I am by seeing him in this older, slower, quieter iteration.  And there was nothing else between us except that recognition.  We didn't have to say anything about it.  We were just living it.  

My mom and dad divorced in 1984, and I went with my mom and sister to Tennessee then.  I was 19.  I quit art school in Indianpolis to go down there with them.  (I hated art school anyway, but still...)  I didn't know what else to do.  We all abandoned Dad then, but he abandoned us too.  Now, both my mom and my dad are old and losing their memories, their capacities, and my sister and I haven't had kids, so this is kind of the end of a lot of stuff.  But that mystery I just tried to define really won't allow anything to end.  Which is the way hope works I guess.  

So here's a last vignette.  Around the time of that photo I had the burning desire to see Apocalypse Now, the Francis Ford Coppola Vietnam war movie based on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.  I was 14 and a total movie freak, would walk to see movies on Saturdays during the summer, would beg and plead my mom and dad to take me.  Going to a movie theatre was like entering a whole new space and time and existence outside of my lower-middle-class one.  But this movie was R-rated and back then it was hard to get in without a parent and also we were Baptists and mom freaked out about bad language and nudity and Hollywood, etc.  

Somehow I talked my dad into taking me on a Sunday night when we didn't go to church because my mom and sister were sick.  I spent the whole day begging, and finally he relented, and drove me there on a snowy January night.  We saw it at the Paramount in Anderson, a gorgeous palatial theatre downtown, with fake Greek statues, a star-painted ceiling, plush maroon seats, and an organist that played a huge glorious pipe-organ before showings.  Me and my dad and 2 other people were in attendance.  That movie blitzed me.  The pleasure of it was in the immensity of the strangeness:  the music, the way the cinematography captured a darkness that seemed darker than dark, the violence, the helicopter-hell sounds.  Coppola created a planet of horrors but then throughout the movie transformed that planet into a sort of machine-gun-and-machete-and-madness mosaic.  

My dad and I were both knocked out.  At the end of it we looked at each other like what in the hell just happened.  We never talked about it again of course.  We didn't really talk too much to each other.  It was just one of those things we shared that made a connection without us having to recognize what the connection was.  The eye contact was enough.

Toward the end, Marlon Brando as Kurtz mumbles his way through TS Eliot's "The Hollow Men."  But there's another Eliot quote I want to end with:  The only wisdom we can hope to aquire is the wisdom of humilty:  humility is endless. 

That's totally what I learned from Thanksgiving 2022, and what I keep learnining over and over.