Reflection: Thanksgiving

Gratitude Grief Grudges - and Gratitude Again

This is the post with which I started on Substack, on Thanksgiving Day 2022. I am republishing it on Thanksgiving Day 2023, with links in the text to stories recounted in detail in subsequent posts. There are 55 posts now, including this one. Not bad for a yearʻs worth of writing. I am going to continue writing here on Substack, moving in a different direction, more essays and community interaction, not so much memoir. Mahalo nui loa for a year of support!

Despite my frequently asserted declaration that I am a scrooge about holidays; prefer not to celebrate them; wallow in my conviction that each is somehow exclusionary, all have been perverted into a calendar of capitalistic excesses, and it would just be much better to love each other always; despite all that I have always had a soft spot for Thanksgiving.

Maybe it is the Proustian madeleine effect of the smell of butter and thyme as I stir them into breadcrumbs for my motherʻs stuffing recipe. Or the joy I have felt over the years of preparing a traditional Thanksgiving meal for friends from other countries who had never tasted pumpkin pie or cranberry sauce. I am not cooking this year. Not all that at least. And a random Facebook memory presented to me this morning was a wormhole into hours of memory and reflection. Hours of gratitude for the many who are friends and family with whom I have shared this meal over the years. Of grief for some who have passed, and some who have merely passed from my life in seemingly irretrievable fashion. Grief can hit in unexpected ways on unexpected days. And grudges? Thatʻs a bit farther into these stories.

This wormhole starts in 1988, the first year I spent Thanksgiving Day outside of the United States. I was in London, living at the Hyde Park Hotel as I worked 16 hour days on financing for RTZʻs acquisition of British Petroleumʻs mining assets. Normally our “days” got me back to the hotel around 11 pm, but on this particular Thursday afternoon my colleague and friend Nick Draper informed me we would be quitting early. His wife had called her American friends and was preparing the best facsimile of a Thanksgiving dinner she could produce for me. The kindness of that evening I have never forgotten. The trajectory of his career has not surprised me.

In 1992 I was again overseas on Thanksgiving, this time trapped in Sao Paulo by the necessity of flying to Rio de Janeiro for the day to make a presentation. The saving grace of that Thursday was I returned in time for my first date with my first boyfriend in Brasil, who took me to Bar Supremo for a meal that was memorable if not in the least American, just totalmente Americinho (wink). Sorry -IYKYK.

A year later, this a Thanksgiving I have captured in photographs, I cooked a turkey and all the trimmings in my apartment at 16 St Lukes Place. From the photos, mainly it was brasilians there that day, beginning with my dear mae brasileira Amelia Toledo. The man I was then dating (yes, I confess, several smart, charming, handsome Brasilieros later) made only a brief appearance. And yet his brief appearance in memory feels more painful today than my saudades for those no longer with us.

The hurt that has yet to heal was the discovery that the story he holds of our time together appears to be so radically different from the one I have told and remembered over the years. Or perhaps more upsetting than the story – to which he is entirely entitled, the artifacts in my home that seem to dispute its accuracy notwithstanding – is my confusion over what purpose could be served by publishing the story as memoir, however thinly disguised.

In working with this revelation over the past year, I have spent a lot of time reflecting on where I have told and tell stories that are unkind and would be better left unspoken. A hard habit to break. And pondering whether my remembered stories of other loves and other relationships might be largely inaccurate, of whether I was ever in the relationships I believed I was in. Ultimately, where I settled with respect to this particular betrayal is this: my story is still my story. The value in it is the gifts that relationship gave me, enduring gifts for which I remain deeply grateful. One of them being, ironically, my confidence in myself as a writer of worth. Valeu.

Rosetta and Craig, Thanksgiving at Alveniaʻs in 1994.

Forward a year, to 1994. That was a Thanksgiving of pure joy at the time, a feast in Alvenia Bridgeʻs apartment of wonders. Most of the “family” that had gathered to help with Carman Mooresʻ Mass for the 21st Century at Lincoln Center Out of Doors were still in New York and wherever we now reside across the globe, we are still family, and for that I am grateful. The photo that sits on the side table next to my desk, of Rosetta Dubois-Gadson and Craig, her son and my brother, was taken that Thanksgiving. It was the last real party Craig attended, although the three of us shared two more Christmas meals together. It shocks me how much missing Craig can unexpectedly gut-punch me 28 years later. Grateful to have learned from Craig the purity of love and light that being present in awareness of oneʻs mortality can bring.

The third time I spent Thanksgiving overseas was in 1997, in Thun, Switzerland. Because of that Thanksgiving meal, I missed a train connection to Munich the following day, a missed-connection connection that became a 17-year marriage. The family at the core of that Thanksgiving meal is still my family, children now adults and even parents themselves, and all of us tied together through the years, through Switzerland and through Hawaiʻi.

The first decade the Swiss Guy and I were here on Hawaiʻi Island I never cooked a holiday meal. My parents were residents at the Regency at Hualalai in Kailua Kona and their holiday buffets rivaled those of any hotel. My motherʻs last Thanksgiving meal, however, was largely uneaten at Kona Community Hospital. My younger sister was with us, and Mom had just made the decision to go into hospice care. Momʻs photo is also on the table next to my desk. Even without a big bird to stuff it into, I will be making her stuffing recipe today.

Mom finally got the joy of meeting a great-grandchild. Holiday dinner at the Regency.

More ironies – I resumed cooking Thanksgiving dinners – in fact, cooking nightly dinners – because I had, at the time, a five year old in the house. The irony is that in the days leading up to turkey day, that young enrolled member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe came home from kindergarten with Thanksgiving materials written from the settler perspective. Rather than just lecture her, I made fumbling new-tutu attempts to guide her bright mind into observation and inquiry, to instill in her the capacity to question what authorities presented against her own sense of self and her place in the world.

Today holds grief that this beloved child currently does not have a place in my world. Grief mixed with tremendous gratitude for the love and lessons of seven intense years of parenting and grand-parenting and growing into understandings of trauma and health in relationships, of the damage that gets passed down across generations and the pathways to healing it.

A new friend said to me last week that she has learned not to carry other peopleʻs grudges. In sitting with the clarity of that statement, I see more clearly today that holding pain because a person I loved and love has rewritten the story of our relationship in a negative way is just me carrying their grudge. I am free to choose the story of love and gratitude, to indulge in memories, as imperfect as all memories are, that will send me back into the world with renewed capacity to love, to live in grace, to hold space for us all to heal.

May we do that today in gratitude for the life we are given and for the opportunities that life in a physical body, with all the loss that eventually entails, gives us to be in service to others. And that is the story I tell. Of the meaning of the myth of the first Thanksgiving and of my memory of the smell of my momʻs stuffing roasting in a turkey big enough to feed all those we take in as family.