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Thursday, November 27, 2008
Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
With the markets tanking, unemployment soaring, millions in danger of losing their homes and home values falling nationwide by almost 17 percent in just the last quarter, we’re supposed to take a day off to count our blessings?
Well, yes. In fact, Thanksgiving couldn’t have come at a better time. After months of increasing fear and an understandable focus on what many of us have lost or could lose in this crisis, today offers a chance to refocus on all that we still have, on all that is more precious to us. It is a chance to remind ourselves that the richness of life can’t be measured in terms of dollars or numbers on the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
In strictly logical terms, it might seem harder to give thanks in tough times such as these, but that’s not how the human minds works. In fact, the opposite is often true: It is hard for most of us to be grateful in good times when everything is going well. We tend to get cocky, both as a nation and as individuals, and we take the good times for granted, assuming incorrectly that such a state of affairs is normal, that this is how it always ought to be and will be.
Conversely, it is human nature to appreciate your blessings most when those gifts seem more fragile and temporary. We suddenly live in an era when just having a steady paycheck and a roof over our heads might be more than cause enough to be thankful.
In fact, as extended circles of friends and family gather today, the odds are that somebody in the group — maybe several somebodies — will have lost their job, their businesss or their home, or have real fears that such a thing could happen in the not so distant future. The economic crisis is so widespread, touching so many industries and regions and economic classes, that no Thanksgiving gathering is likely to be immune to such fear.
But we’ve been through a lot worse before, as families if not as individuals, and we have things to draw on. A lot of folks, for example, still have Depression-era lore as part of their family history. It’s the wisdom of elders, passed down in narrative form by those who lived through hardships that we still have a difficult time imagining.
In my own family, the story that strikes deepest might be called the Night of the Oranges.
Back in the ’30s, my grandmother and grandfather were raising six kids in a West Virginia coal-mining town. That was tough enough, but it got worse when my grandfather, a machinist, was paralyzed by a stroke and bedridden for the rest of his life. Suddenly, my grandmother had seven mouths to feed and no breadwinner to help out.
When I’ve heard stories from that era, my aunts and uncles always seem to point out that other people had it worse than they did. But my Uncle Pat does tell the tale of a night somewhere around Christmas when a group of my grandfather’s co-workers showed up at the door bearing a holiday basket of canned food, candy and fresh oranges.
Uncle Pat recalls being transfixed at the sight of those oranges, which were apparently quite the luxury item in that time and place.
But my grandmother, a tough little wisp of a woman, bridled at what she saw as the offering of charity. She turned the men away and told them to take the basket with them, much to the dismay of the children standing behind her in the doorway.
(I should point out that Dad doesn’t remember the scene quite so cinematically, but hey, Pat always was the better storyteller.)
Those were tough people, people you could count on. At some point today, look at those around you; they are your certainty and security, and you are theirs.
