Miriam Feder

Thanks for a big brown bird, soft and crunchy stuffing, sweet yams, a tart cranberry relish and ample bottles of wine. Thanks for a fresh green salad and don’t mind if I skip the smashed potatoes, rolls and that baked broccoli-cheese traditional. Who would notice?

Thanks for bringing this group together year upon year, through marriages, visiting parents, babies, toddlers, widowed mothers, t’weens, divorces, rearrangements, and— for some time now— only one Grandma left. Maybe sometime we’ll be the grandmas. Will that add to or take away? Yes, well, don’t anyone hold their breath.Thanks for all the spills, the misses, and fine nights of charades.

This is what my Thanksgivings have looked like for most of thirty years. A tight and cozy table at a friend’s house with once-a-year linen and platters upon platters. It must have been a whole year between each one of these food-a-thons, but I’m surprised they add up so high.

Thanks for good fortune in our own lives. We’re fortunate that our sadnesses have been transitory: real but not chronic. Long suffering has stayed distant from this table. Death has come only for the older ones.  We’ve come to know that’s not always the case and so we’ve grown so very grateful.

Our children…they already grew up so fast. Now that we see the rate of spin, we know their lives will fly right by at an increasing rate. We know that the next ten years might have some harsh surprises for them—for us. No rush, no rush—but no slowing it down.

Take a few moments before dessert. Take a basket, choose teams and try to recollect the movies ofthe year, the book titles nobody read and the songs that separate the generations.  Let me hold onto this enormous good and gather in all the smells and tastes, the warmth and the story, the hopes, the disappointments and the familiar smiles. Let me taste them like another course, no matter how full I am. Four and twenty lifetimes baked in a pie. Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full.

 

 Thanksgiving [2:25m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (35)

I’m posting early to help celebrate Oregon’s Day of Culture. I’m not talking about high culture, or low, but rather that trickle of heritage we all carry around like our own little petri dish.  What is it?

Culture is that second skin, laid down so close to mosquito bites and freckles I didn’t even see it. Isn’t this how everybody makes soup, sets the table, welcomes the end of the week and tucks away to dreamland?  Well at Ellen’s the soup had dill. Mike’s Mom cried when we sang. Gina had Christmas. 

They rubbed my second skin with the liniment of literature: stories of stories the way my parents heard them; parts forgotten; untranslated; skipped or stopped; with belly laughs at punch lines that were never uttered. Well, everybody knew that old story—didn’t they?  

My Grandmother’s story left out different parts than Amy’s Grandfather telling. Practice paraded through ears, eyes and nostrils in cramped kitchens and mahogany halls. Orders and legions of never written mandates governed what dress to wear, who to greet and how—poked and prodded by grudges, invasions, and insinuations.

Perhaps those traditions were carefully embroidered on my cuticle, binding in biology, melody, and cadence, bathing each cell from womb-time. Each cell dies; each cell is born. The shield reinforces and reinvents, supports and censors.

There’s tension skin against skin: shushing breaths; whirring of earth beneath my feet; the heat,  cold, and indescribable smell of fall-turned leaves. The names that came, the reasons, the tastes that joined those season-smells. Where did I get that? How did it happen to me before I even knew?

It’s in there still, no matter what else crowds in or purges out. It’s in there, in charge, singing in the corners of my mind, spinning out minor chords and faded doilies.  It’s as inadvertent and essential to me as it always has been: step, by song, by soup bowl, by belly laugh.

 

 Culture [2:17m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (37)