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Astute blog readers may have noticed that content has been a little light at The Quivering Pen lately. Chalk it up to a busy book tour schedule, extra work piling up at the Day Job, and writing the opening chapters of a new book (yes, it's true--I've gone back to work at the keyboard....more on that later). The blog still limps along, though, and I'm grateful to everyone who continues to support it. I'll try to add more new content in the coming weeks. For now, please enjoy these older Thanksgiving-themed posts from the blog archives. And be sure to enter the current Friday Freebie giveaway (deadline is tomorrow night!).
To get things started, here's a little something from Richard Ford and his novel The Lay of the Land:
As everyone knows, the Thanksgiving “concept” was originally strong-armed onto poor war-worn President Lincoln by an early-prototype forceful-woman editor of a nineteenth-century equivalent of the Ladies’ Home Journal, with a view to upping subscriptions. And while you can argue that the holiday commemorates ancient rites of fecundity and the Great-Mother-Who-Is-in-the-Earth, it’s in fact always honored storewide clearances and stacking ’em deep ’n selling ’em cheap—unless you’re a Wampanoag Indian, in which case it celebrates deceit, genocide and man’s indifference to who owns what.
Thanksgiving also, of course, signals the beginning of the gloomy Christmas season, vale of aching hearts and unreal hopes, when more suicide successes, abandonments, spousal thumpings, car thefts, firearm discharges and emergency surgeries take place per twenty-four-hour period than any other time of year except the day after the Super Bowl. Days grow ephemeral. No one’s adjusted to the light’s absence. Many souls buy a ticket to anyplace far off just to be in motion. Worry and unwelcome self-awareness thicken the air. Though strangely enough, it’s also a great time to sell houses. The need to make amends for marital bad behavior, or to keep a way eye on the tax calendar to deliver on the long-postponed family ski outing to Mount Pisgah—all make people itchy to buy. There’s no longer a real off-season for house sales. Houses sell whether you want them to or not.
In my current state of mind, I’d, in fact, be just as happy to lose Christmas and its weak sister New Year’s, and ring out the old year quietly with a cocktail by the Sony. One of divorce’s undervalued dividends, I should say, is that all the usual dismal holiday festivities can now be avoided, since no one who didn’t have to would ever think about seeing the people they used to say they wanted to see but almost certainly never did.
And yet, Thanksgiving won’t be ignored. Americans are hard-wired for something to be thankful for. Our national spirit thrives on invented gratitude. Even if Aunt Bella’s flat-lined and in custodial care down in Rucksville, Alabama, we still “need” her to have some white meat and gravy, and be thankful, thankful, thankful. After all, we are—if only because we’re not in her bedroom slippers.
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This week’s Friday Freebie contest is for Mudbound by Hillary Jordan. One lucky reader will win a new paperback movie-tie-in edition of the 2008 novel. The Washington Post Book World calls Jordan’s book “A compelling family tragedy, a confluence of romantic attraction and racial hatred that eventually falls like an avalanche...The last third of the book is downright breathless.”
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Just to keep things in perspective, every so often I like to re-visit the journal I kept during my deployment to Baghdad with the 3rd Infantry Division in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. The words I wrote in 2005 are sometimes silly, sometimes smart, and sometimes bullheaded--but they're always stark reminders of how far removed I am from the Sergeant First Class David Abrams of those days. It's like he's on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon waving his arms to the present-day me standing on the North Rim--not unlike the Iraq War itself which is rapidly receding from our national memory.
November 24, 2005: Thanksgiving.
Perhaps the most melancholy day I’ve spent here so far. All I could think about all day long was what Jean and the kids were doing back in Georgia: cooking the turkey, lazing around in their pajamas until mid-afternoon, and then going to see a movie (a family tradition) after the meal. I started feeling really sorry for myself and was pelted with waves of loneliness and homesickness.
My feelings were compounded by the deaths from the day before as I thought about how someone’s Thanksgiving was suddenly tuned into a personal hell when the casualty assistance officers showed up on their doorstep. Maybe the house was still filled with the smell of just-baked pumpkin pies, now cooling on the counter. Maybe somebody fainted in the doorway as the officer started delivering his speech, “The Secretary of the Army has asked me to express his deep regret...” Maybe that officer, so beautiful in his crisp dress uniform, burned under the heat of a wife’s scream, maybe he felt like the grim reaper standing there in the cooling Georgia evening.
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The Tweet read "It's Thanksgiving; which writers or books are you thankful for? Share with Twitter! Use #readerthanks to participate." My thanks-giving was: "#readerthanks go to the guy who wrote that EZ Reader book on Pilgrims I found in the Kittaning (Pa.) Library 44 yrs ago. Look what U wrought"
Thinking of this book brought back memories of the days, circa 1968, when I would walk from my brick home on Arch Street in Kittanning to the Armstrong County Public Library. I held my mother's hand, skipping ahead, pulling her along the sidewalk, impatient to get to the House of Books. The library was built in 1860 and had Italianate-style white columns at the front entrance. From my small perspective, it was huge: high ceilings, an imposing front desk which one approached like a royal throne, and, along dark passageways behind the desk, towering shelves full of books (adult books) which would someday be mine once I mastered the English language.
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Cindy Ott's "curious history" of the pumpkin is a terrific stem-to-seed overview of our orange crush on what's been called the "national vegetable" (better luck next time, Mr. Broccoli). Ott primarily (though not exclusively) looks at the pumpkin's American history, including the first Thanksgiving dinner, which almost certainly did not finish with wedges of golden-brown pumpkin pie. "No one mentioned dining on pumpkin at the feast that day in Plymouth--not a word about it," she writes. Squash--which, by the way, is loaded with Vitamin A--was a sacred part of early Native American life; the Iroquois even held an annual feast of squash. "American Indians introduced the pumpkin to European explorers and colonists, who regarded it with the same mix of wonder and disdain with which they viewed must of North America."
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