Thanksgiving Recap: Give a Little Respect

Until recently Thanksgiving has been a pretty predictable affair, though for me it's becoming one of those holidays to appreciate only after learning how to abuse one’s sense of retrospect. The Thanksgivings I had growing up were mostly obligatory. My brother and I dusted off our penny loafers, tucked in our shirts, and arrived at our grandparents’ house ready to eat at 3 PM. Then, a decade later, I flew home from college in Oregon and practiced mute wisdom (except for pointing out all gendered power dynamics happening around the table) and asked if there was chicken broth in the stuffing. The first year after I’d moved to New York, my roommate and I stayed put and invited friends over; I made spinach lasagna (because I was still a vegetarian) and my roommate made oyster dressing that was gyrating both before and after it came out of the oven, and we all got very drunk and a little high and many of us hooked up that night. The next year I went to Boise because my grandmother was dying, and the year after that we delivered a roast turkey, etc, to my mom’s hospital room, and the year after that was a sad affair in Arizona at my grandfather’s house—just my brother, dad, grandfather, and me—and then a few Thanksgivings went by uneventfully. Last year I thought I’d have the chance to fulfill my relatively recent fantasy of hosting a proper Thanksgiving on my home turf, but in a turn of events indicative of where things were going with my ex, we went to one of his friend's apartments instead. During the phone call to Arizona, where the rest of my family was, my grandfather was the first to register my disappointment: “You’re telling me that you’re not doing all the cooking?” “No, Grandpa, not [sigh, sniffle]—not this year.” I decided that it’s much better in the end to have at least one family member around for these types of holidays, and also that a shared enthusiasm for hosting Thanksgiving would be a prerequisite in my next boyfriend.



My Dad has been seeing someone for a few years with whom he has many bizarre things in common, chief among them deceased spouses of the same names and same causes of death. She and her family are very Christian, and I am not, and neither is my father. Over the years I’ve come to respect how her church has given her comfort and support, but it still gives me pause.

This year I spent Thanksgiving with my Dad and his girlfriend’s extended family out at a cold beach, where everyone was really nice and welcomed me in with enthusiasm. We began dinner by gathering in the round and singing hymns. They'd been typed up, printed out, and passed around so that everyone (meaning: Dad and I) could follow, and then someone said grace. We split up between two different tables and ate the whole gluttonous meal: turkey and stuffing and lots of delicious casseroles and gooey cheddar biscuits. Over dinner, I heard about one son/brother/cousin who was abroad teaching English through an international program and doubling as a covert Christian missionary: “Because they are required to teach about Western culture,” his mother told me, “and Christianity is a part of Western culture . . .” I slowly nodded my head and said, “Oh.” Dinner was followed by “Rock Band 2,” which we played while sampling a bunch of pies, and then we all played a round of Taboo, which might be my favorite board game (this doesn’t include Uno because it’s not a board game).



During the afternoon, one young couple got engaged. They went for a walk on the beach, he popped the question to her, got an affirmative, and when they came back to the house the family was gathered around the porch with champagne and “Happy Engagement” cocktail napkins, singing “Let Me Call You Sweetheart.” There was another champagne toast the next day when another recently engaged couple arrived. I wondered how, if any one of these people were invited to a gathering of my gay friends (all five of them) and presented with the opportunity to participate in a similar celebration (do we get engaged before we get fake married?), how she/he would respond. I did feel genuinely happy for the newly engaged couples, simply because they seemed so happy, but in the end would she/he do what I did, which was to smile big and tightly, offer my congratulations, and then refill the glass? I think so. The tendency to bypass direct conflict in favor of harboring passively destructive “beliefs”—such as opposition to gay marriage, or opposition to holding hands and signing hymns, which I use here as a stand-in for Christianity at large—is something as American as . . . Thanksgiving.

The next day we ate leftovers, which was preceded by another prayer in the round. We held hands. To one side stood my Dad and to the other the resident Southern Patriarch who everyone called Grandaddy. He reminded me of a Tennessee Williams character, as most Southern men do, but one who is all goodness and really pleasant to be around. I closed my eyes and bowed my head and listened as one of Grandaddy’s sons delivered grace. It was a fairly routine one, calling for thankfulness for all the food and for the family to be together and the good will of the Lord, etc. Towards the end there was a reference to those “here with us, and those beyond.” While this type of oblique reference (here read by me as a reference to my mother), in any situation, usually fails to move me much, the sense of loss I did perceive right then was compounded by that of everyone else: my Dad, obviously, but his girlfriend (who lost a husband), and Grandaddy (who lost a son), and his entire family that had also lost a father/brother/uncle in the same way that I had. Grandaddy squeezed my hand firmly, and I’d be lying to say that right then I didn’t feel a surge of—of I don’t know what: Vulnerability? The Good Lord? An allergy to pineapple casserole? The point is that I felt something, and felt an immediate kinship with Grandaddy, with my mom, and my dad. It passed a split second later, and I was okay with that.



Later in the weekend, after I got back from the beach, I visited my Dad’s next-door neighbors. They are a 30-something couple and have two young sons, one who for several reasons doesn’t eat wheat or dairy or soy and has many other dietary restrictions. His mother, Stephanie, has made raising him and his brother a full-time job for the next several years, and watching her interact with her kids is a remarkable thing: one sits in awe and tries, with very little success, to help. After the kids were put to bed (they both came downstairs wearing their adorable pajamas and bid me goodnight), the conversation turned to gay things, as it usually does, via my mother, via Stephanie’s children, via Christians in North Carolina. I told her about my gay cousins: years ago, when I came out to one of them he basically shrugged it off because he believed my Mom to be so “lax” about it (I’ll never know if this was true or not, but my feeling is that it’s not). Then I told her about a friend of mine whose mother has not come to terms with her daughter being bisexual, despite her habit of reaching out to any of her daughter’s friends that struggle with sexuality issues. “The only reason I can kind of understand that behavior,” Stephanie told me, “is that you put so much time into your kids, and you try to send them out into the world with a sense of self-knowledge and self-satisfaction, and then they come to you with something you didn’t factor in. Like, ‘How could I not have accommodated for this?’ ”

Now, as evidenced by my Thanksgiving 2009 experience, I live in an alternate universe in New York. But I still can’t imagine, these days, that parents don't wonder about their children’s sexuality, especially parents like Stephanie, who I'm pretty sure doesn't apply here (she has a PhD in child psychology). But it seemed like a nice way to look at conflict: How much of what we agree and disagree with, or believe and don’t believe, stems from having accommodated for it? And: is it the same thing as voluntary ignorance? Maybe. Or maybe it just means that life is easier if you don't have any expectations.