Thanksgiving 2024

Many tables with room for all. Have a wonderful Thanksgiving.

While one might disparage the white colonialism that birthed the holiday along with the bowdlerization of its history, I like to think time denatures these things and leaves us with a Norman Rockwellesque secular day of family travel, over-eating, discontent, and infighting. Our American tradition.

But pointed opening aside, the season in general, along with the coming year’s end, does — if we but take it — give us a chance to pause and reflect on the past year and what it meant to us. And, if the soul is gentled and still, to find things to be thankful for.

Those who both science and write often use this as an excuse to find some aspect of the physical world to post thankfully about. I’ve read posts giving thanks for gravity and light. I’ve written such posts myself. One year it was patterns, another it was Unicode. Last year it was a bit of a riff on water.

This year, still a bit bemused by the election, I had no plan for a Thanksgiving post. Not from any lack of gratitude or thanks but from a sense of temporary disconnect and ennui. This can be a hard season for single childless sun-loving adults whose parents have passed on. I get through it with a kind of mental hibernation. Ignore it and eventually it goes away.

Tinge of seasonal malaise aside, aging aside, politics very much aside, there is much I have to be thankful for. Top of that list is my friend BentleyMom, whose friendship has been a bulwark against the miasma of insanity and stupidity in the modern world. It’s a rare and cherished gift to find someone with similar views, and a solid friendship is great treasure. I’m thankful for all my good friends (and my sister), but BentleyMom is special (and so is my sister).

I’m thankful for Bentley, too, of course!

But that’s personal and something I try to acknowledge more often than annually on a day I’m socially poked to be thankful. If I join the crowd at all today, it’s generally (read: almost certainly) going to be about something geeky (like Unicode) rather than personal.

So, today I had no plan to post, but yesterday was cloudy and dark, and in my dark kitchen it suddenly dawned on me how thankful I was for the skylight in my living room.

Without that skylight, my kitchen would be dark and depressing.

In fact, it was one of the main reasons I bought this place.

[And that it was one level. My black lab, Sam, had recently had knee surgery, and I didn’t want her to have to deal with stairs.]

Not only does it allow a beam of sunlight down into my living room from roughly 10 AM to 2 PM, but it also acts as my own personal Stonehenge. And I can judge when it’s time for lunch because it also acts like a sundial over the noon stretch.

That daily beam of sunlight shifts with the season. In the winter, for a period of several weeks, the angle of the Sun is low enough that the beam doesn’t escape the deep well of the skylight.

Left: (Dec 22) sunlight trapped in well. Right: (Jan 12) it’s back.

Which means that when the days are shortest and darkest, I get no beam of sunlight. There’s an old joke about the guy banging his head against the wall. When asked why, he says it’s because it feels so good when he stops. When the sunlight returns to my living room, the room starts living up to its name again.

Without that, my kitchen would be horribly dark. When I was hunting for a post-divorce place to live, one criterion was a kitchen with south and/or east windows. I want lots of light in my kitchen in the morning. I also wanted a bedroom with east and/or south windows for that morning sunlight.

I did get the south windows in the bedroom, but the kitchen is at the windowless back of the open plan living room slash dining area slash kitchen. Were it not for that skylight, I wouldn’t have this place, and this place has turned out to be ideal for me, so I’m thankful AF I found it.

Dog Sam and I even made the local newspapers because of this purchase:

Sam and I in front of living room windows in our new home.

My one (and only) claim to something of a 15-minutes. Being interviewed by an actual newspaper reporter was kind of a rush.

Anyway, today I give thanks for finding this place and especially the skylight. So much in life doesn’t work out as we’d wish, but this was one of those rare “got it right this time” times.

And while thinking about this post (and many other things), it occurred to me to be thankful for one other thing. I’m a card-carrying life-long curmudgeon, a raging misanthrope, and a severely ingrown introvert. While people endlessly fascinate me, my experiences with them have generally aligned me with Sartre’s famous line.

That said, my dad, a Lutheran minister who defected from the “worldly church” (the organization of religion but not the beliefs) to become a printer and book publisher had the to me astonishing ability to chat amicably with anyone. I mean anyone. Any walk of life, any background, anyone. It was one of his greatest strengths.

One I tried so hard to understand and learn.

Mom and Dad. Center: their 60th wedding anniversary.

When I was in high school, I was clumsy. If I had to pass several seated people in a movie theater to get to my seat, I was sure to step on several feet along the way. And possibly fall into a lap or two. I hated being clumsy and focused on trying to be more graceful. Whether it was just growing into my body or that my efforts paid off, there came a time when I realized I wasn’t so clumsy anymore.

[And now age is making me clumsy again. Arg!]

Likewise, at some point I realized I’d gained some small facility with small talk. I never rose anywhere near the level of my dad, but I can thank him now for the role model he presented (in many, many areas) and for providing that goal, a good one for an introvert who just might be in the foothills of the spectrum.

So, yeah, thanks for gravity and light and patterns and Unicode and water, but much more importantly, thanks for great friends, a good upbringing by intelligent and moral parents, and the sunlight that streams through the wonderful rectangular hole in my ceiling.

Have a great Thanksgiving everyone!

Stay thankful, my friends! Go forth and spread beauty and light.

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