Thanksgiving in a Time of Cholera

Thanksgiving is Thursday. Even in pandemic times, there’s much to be grateful for.

My relationship with Thanksgiving has varied. Of course I loved it as a kid. We enjoyed family gatherings with aunts, uncles, and cousins who lived elsewhere.

What lingers in memory as the Platonic ideal of “Thanksgiving” is a national magazine’s 1953 cover, a Rockwellish painting of my immediate family, plus several neighbors and strangers to make it look more festive. The artist painted it from a photograph he had taken of us in a neighbor’s beautiful old-fashioned dining room. In the foreground, as the family says grace, I’m slyly reaching with one hand to steal an olive and my father’s right hand is extended to warn me that he’ll slap me if I do. (I was young enough to complain to the artist, “But I don’t like olives!”)

In maybe 1956, we watched the Macy’s Parade. The only place open for Thanksgiving Dinner was the Horn & Hardart Automat, delighting us kids, though not Mother. Outside, a ragged man was sleeping one off. Mother bought a wrapped turkey sandwich and left it beside him.

Other Thanksgivings had their own magic; but the story about the pilgrims thanking the Indians seemed less moving as I learned more about how whites treated the tribes.

Later, I cared little about Thanksgiving, and liked being alone. Sometimes someone would invite me, convinced that being alone on Thanksgiving was terrible.

On Thanksgiving 1974, Las Cruces Mayor Bob Munson and his wife, Diana, invited me – and I had a great time. 

 I’ve spent some Thanksgivings in countries that knew little of it. In 1984, traveling on Thanksgiving in 1984, I saw in the Korea Times two photos whose proximity made an eloquent statement: a starving Ethiopian mother-and-child and a chubby two-year-old awaiting Thanksgiving turkey in Paradise, PA.

The happiest Thanksgiving was the November I met my wife.

More recently we’ve spent Thanksgivings in the home of a poet and an artist, with their family and mutual friends. Everyone contributes. One young man makes irresistible apple pies. Between the main meal and consuming those pies, with ice cream, we walk along the river, gabbing and tossing a football. Not this year. Zoom can’t match that pie!

All of which is to urge everyone: DON’T DO IT!

Please celebrate your wonderful circle of family and friends by helping increase the odds they’ll be around next Thanksgiving. Many people plan to attend Thanksgiving gatherings with at least ten people. At a 10-person gathering one has a 40% chance of running into someone who’s COVID-19-positive. It’s nearer 15% in some coastal cities, 60% in Chicago, and nearly 90% in El Paso. Doña Ana County? 93%!

Masks, staying outdoors, and seating different households separately could decrease the probability of infection. But as we get more festive, perhaps with alcohol, inhibitions weaken. (A lot of babies get conceived that way!) Masks could start feeling silly.

If your family or friends eschew masks, your odds of celebrating Christmas in quarantine or an overtaxed hospital go way up. Tuesday New Mexico’s record 2,112 new cases was hundreds higher than the previous record; then on Thursday, we counted 3,675! A 12-year-old New Mexican died last week. Our county took 77 days to record 20 deaths, 21 days to go from 60-80, then six to reach 100.

Anyway, Happy Thanksgiving! We’ve a lot to be grateful for. Let’s keep it that way.

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[The above column appeared this morning, Sunday, 22 November 2020, in the Las Cruces Sun-News, as well as on the newspaper's website on the newspaper’s website and KRWG’s website. A related radio commentary will air during the week on KRWG and KTAL-LP.] (http://www.lccommunityradio.org/), and will be available on demand on KRWG’s site. ]

[Somewhere around, I have the magazine with our ideal “Thanksgiving” on the cover. It’s such a perfect vision of the early 1950’s. Wish I knew exactly where it is - but I also have to insert a clarification here: limited to 570 words, I used the phrase, "

a Rockwellish painting" meaning to invoke a famous style but make clear that the artist was not Norman Rockwell himself.  A couple of friends
assumed our family was in the Rockwell painting on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post, or asked me if we were.  No.  Ours was something like Family Circle or Modern Family or something.  And it could have been 1952, maybe even 1954.  I assume my friends were referring to Rockwell's 1943 Freedom from Want, one of his famous Four Freedoms paintings made before I was born, although he also had a Saturday Evening Post cover, Saying Grace, in which a mother

and son (inspired by Mennonites a friend had seen praying in a restaurant) are praying, observed by others sharing their table in the crowded restaurant.]  The artist who painted us was a fellow resident of Croton-on-Hudson, a friend or acquaintance; and he posed us with the others as sort of a Platonic ideal of Thanksgiving, but added the very Rockwellish touch of having me (with my right hand still up by my face, as if praying) reach with my left hand for an olive, while my father has silently stretched our his right arm in a menacing way.)]

[ Glancing at this morning’s Sun-News on line confirmed that Las Crucens are suffering and that hospitals are overtaxed. Hospitals reported they were at capacity a while ago, and numbers of cases then spiked dramatically. I’ve inserted a screen-grab of that page below, and here’s a link to Bethany Freudenthal's story on the hospital situation here.]

[I know that some believe perhaps we make too much of the virus, and should simply shoot for herd immunity. The vast majority of scientists, and perhaps all virologists, disagree with that approach. I’m no scientist, but how many people would we have to kill off, and how many medical folks would be dead or hurt by the virus, before we reached that goal? What no one who refuses to wear a mask has yet managed to explain to me is why the minor inconvenience of a mask outweighs the risk of doing harm to many others? Seems to me, even if it isn’t 100% clear that widespread use of masks decrease spread of COVID-19 in a community (as so many studies and the great weight of scientific opinion indicate), why not bear that small inconvenience on the chance that it could save a life?]

Maximilian Sunflower Seeds Make a Great Thanksgiving Dinner If You're a Goldfinch

Note: the Rockwell images above are thanks to Wikipedia.