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)

Alone is a common way to be when you’re an only child. So common I stopped noticing that other people were usually in groups. So common I didn’t bother to learn how to share myself with others. Physical needs, those could be dispatched in hot-blooded bedrooms and backseats. Social needs were fulfilled in parties and communal living. But day to day walking and working through life nobody seemed to notice me—even me.

I wouldn’t call myself a loner. I’ve always had gatherings on my calendar, different pockets of people, new friends to make, old friends to catch up on. But I’m just fine alone—even in a movie theater—that most forbidding of lone adventures.

I’ve walked the streets of small towns, big cities, beaches, exotic continents, parks and neighborhoods, all alone. I’ve made most decisions big and small alone. I’ve trod the hardest trails alone: a father’s death; a mother’s deterioration; divorce; a child’s debilitating illness; job loss; career dissatisfaction. I barely knew to call on anyone. I kept partners and friends at the periphery. There has always been an invisible barrier that I unknowingly establish. Some came closer and then spun out. Some couldn’t stand the demands, the not-knowing, the shifting priorities these trials set up for me. Some would have been there for me had I let them. And some did get through to me and took a bit of the strain from my tired bones.

I lived well-loved with my parents for eighteen years. I spent thirty years as part of one couple or another. People might not have noticed how alone I was. Coupling can be so isolating. At its worst, it steals the generous mantle of solitude and replaces it with missed opportunity. And it looks to all the world like you have a partner. In those unconnected hours face to face with my partner, drenched in the ice-water of failed intimacy alone became loneliness.

When embrace is worm-eaten, when the arms belongs to the preoccupied or self-important, when he can see only his own reflection in the pool, when the hand gropes for the brittle or the habitual, it warps the strong dependable muscles of the body’s right side. The crust around that right shoulder, thigh and calf, becomes slightly soggy—rancid in the promising chords of camaraderie. Then, if some of the weight—the unearthly weight of sadness, the gonging weight of concern, the black weight of doubt, the sharp stones of anxiety—shifts, the softened side collapses, endangering both of us, sprained and sprawling atop the original hardship. So dissolution accompanies a child’s illness. So death warps life. But alone, standing on two strong legs… Well, the feet may wear, the shoulders ache, the breath rasp, but the slow stride uphill can continue, almost indefinitely.

Alone may not have learned how to ask, or how to share the burden, the questions or the uncertainty. Alone is used to marshaling, not unburdening. She dares not risk collapse too often. And too, alone is the child of alone. Generations have not asked, have not confided, have marshaled.

Alone has its own problems, to be sure. But self-reliance isn’t among them. Alone comes through—sometimes without asking all the right questions, sometimes based on incorrect assumptions, sometimes not as good as it could have been, but the tasks get done, the feet are re-bandaged, the shopworn heart is revived with bygone balms and blossoming boughs. Alone.

 

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In Print

 

 Second Chance [8:25m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (83)

In Print

I’m no longer young enough to try everything, but I’m old enough to try anything. Are there archeologists coming to rescue me from the avalanche of loneliness in small matters? In Print

 

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Couldn’t we just take the love and leave the nagging.  In Print

 

 Older Parents [3:22m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (60)

She’s too this, he’s too that…I call it the too too s.  They become a fixation when I’m in my judgemental mode.  And I’ve tried to notice this voice and tone it down;  those judgemental lashes hurt me most of all.  But we all make judgements and that’s not the same thing.

 

 Judgemental--Who Me?: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (122)

In Print

I’ve come back to this very romantic piece for Valentine’s Day.

We barely knew each other, but it was time to celebrate his birthday. So I suggested a trip to the coast? What location held more promise, energy, escape?

The atmosphere was so charged just checking into the hotel. I hadn’t checked into a hotel with a man other than my ex in over 20 years. There was a king sized bed, a hot tub, and him and me and hours and hours of us.

Just after midnight we finally dragged ourselves out of bed and down to the beach. I’d heard something about the Leonid meteor shower. No one would count on a clear sky at Cannon Beach, but there it was, black velvet sparkled with stars everywhere– and then they started to fly. They shot from the foreground to the background, across the sky in wild arcs, low to high and back again. They fired at Haystack Rock in the Pacific. The trusty monument was surprised to hand over its glory to the coastal sky, finally free of her chinchilla stole and busy staging the best light-show in the world.

The half-dozen of us strung across the wide beach bonded in ecstatic exclamations. We spun around dizzily to catch the action. The sky wasn’t still for a moment. My birthday boy knew all the constellations by name, distance, and location. He was a fabulous guide to our sparkled travels that evening: twisting, turning and gasping in the excitement of it all. Some hours later, we finally gave it up, although the show went on and on.

I learned since that nature does not speak in signs, metaphors, allegories or favorites. That brilliant display had nothing to do with our brilliance, suitability, or the destiny of our love, however much I wanted to believe it. Romance, like everything else, looks for confirmation. And what could be better than this amazing night with my star stud. It was fantastic and for awhile, it sparkled our shiniest points.

 

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Sometimes we run around like a chicken with it’s head cut off–sometimes like a mad dog. What an animal! Mad Dog revisited.

 

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