Thanksgiving greetings

Happy Thanksgiving Day greetings, Brother!

It’s been a while since I’ve posted here. Time passes in bigger and bigger gobs. So much more of it where you haven’t been going about the details of you life. I know, I know – the dead always fade into oblivion – Yet the candle of memory can always be tended, and since your family will be gathering in various nooks of the country today – Dad and Fred at Columcille with friends, Will with Sarah and her family at their house, Molly and her family over to her mother-in-law’s, Mom to join me and Beth and a continent of Beth’s extended family for a Thanksgiving buffet at Mission Inn (no cooking, no cleaning!!), your absent-precence is strong and I wish to make note of it and remember you by way of keeping you at our far-flung, collective tables.

Not that Thanksgiving was ever much of a family holiday for you, not since you graduated from high school and began your travels westward. I have to think back to the early 80's to the last time you sat around a big table with some of us to eat too much turkey. It was just after your near-fatal car accident when you came home to Mom's duplex in Winter Park for a while to recuperate.

That year Mom and Molly and you and I joined the Hellingers for the meal at their house. I remember you and I playing on the same side of a pickup game of touch football in their back yard—playing against cousins. The day wan and fair, not hot, breezy, hardly cool in any Thanksgiving-ish way. But in Florida you make do with “seasons” as you can …

Your external wounds were by then mostly healed over. You kept your difficulties hearing in group gatherings to yourself (the severing of hearing in one ear from the accident made it very hard to triangulate voices around a table). You smiled and ate, sometimes leaning a certain way to attempt to hear better, but you were mostly silent as the rest of us jabbered on.

Not long after that, the insurance settlement came through and used most of it to buy a Dodge Ram truck which you drove out of that town and Florida for so many years, never again joining any contingent of the family for Thanksgiving.

As I recall from what you’d said here and there over the years, Thanksgiving was sort of a personal holiday for you. You usually set out alone, hiking into the woods, getting high up into the hills. Many years Mom would try to call you on Thanksgiving to wish you a happy holiday and get your phone recorder, leaving your recorded voice the message. How many years did you make it back to your apartment worn out and cold with rolls of film you’d shot that day in your pocket, listening in the darkness of your apartment to that cheery voice say “I Love You”?

In the latter years as you settled down in Salem, I think some of the calls got through to you; you were home, doing in-town things, perhaps with your girlfriend or doing something with a local community, your church perhaps. Then it was passing the phone around at Mom’s as she and Molly and I spoke with you, each having a turn with our distant brother, exchanging the banalities of news. Updates on jobs and kids and stuff was never the point, was it? It was just the connection of voices across so many miles. So much news builds since your death – we would have so much to update – but that’s a connection which we’ll never make again, and for that I’m sad today, and sorry, and feel your absence in a profound way.

Those feelings don’t come as often these days, but when they do, they rise with the weight and freight of your absence making the pain duller and sharper at the same time, bigger for becoming smaller. Don’t know if that makes any sense, but then we’re all growing into the long landscape of grief in our own ways, it tempered by other losses and difficulties and joys. Dad on the phone last week spoke of how much he missed you, walking around the grounds of Columcille, sitting in the chapel where some of your cremains are buried. Talking with you as the two of you came to talk so easily in the last years, the past gone enough, the present full of fragile promise.

But that connection which got interrupted and then cut, for all of us, when we lost you in April 2008, trudging now towards three years ago.

Well, I still can send you this message, which really is just a post for your living family perhaps to read and remember you by too, and in that remembrance feel united even though we live our lives at such a distance. You knew distance more than any of us do, though you came to regret that distance and made attempts to shorten it. Perhaps by now you would have been living somewhere in the mid-Atlantic as you said you were considering, North Carolina or Tennessee, a place between Pennsylvania and Florida which you could reach with greater ease, where we might in turn come to visit you, something none of us did well enough. A place where there were mountains and wilderness for you to roam and photograph and celebrate your love of beauty and God in.

Perhaps. But that’s a history we can only imagine now, as I imagine you permanently walking out in the Oregon wild on some permanently isolate Thanksgiving Day, so far from the Thanksgiving Day we will celebrate in our own ways in the day to come.

It’s 5:30 here now in Mount Dora, around 60 degres, dark with pale moonlight from a growing moon etching the garden’s dark contours with a wintry silver. It’s not cold, though – we’ll be into the low 80’s today – but it is of a different season from summer. I sat out around 4 a.m. feeding Mamacita and that other stray we feed, a motley ragged black-and-white cat whose gender is so indeterminate we play it safe by calling it Tiffany Joe, watching the night, feeling its deep, dreaming stillness, the only sound coming from distant semis on US-441 a mile away, the hooting of an owl in a tree down the street, and the random, staccato sound of nuts falling from trees onto tin roofs and the street.  

A washing, lonely sound, the deep deep night: Yet I am home and so grateful to have what little I do have – a wife I so love, this house, our cats, a job, health that is better in some ways (no migraines!) and worse in others (I get fat), activities I love and look forward to growing (I’m now re-reading “Hamlet” and starting to write verse again).

I’m grateful, too, for the coming day’s chance to break bread with a small part of our family –- which is all any of us ever get. Grateful that we’re all still here--except for you—for another year. And I’m grateful for your having been your while in our life, and for the enduring images you left behind, and for the presence I still feel of you, as if you continue to walk alongside me invisibly yet tangibly, the other tall brother, silently conversing, laughing, catching up, talking shop, talking about love, sobriety, God.

Happy Thanksgiving, Brother. Enjoy the wild heart of God where you now fully reside. We’ll lift a glass for you at the table and remember, and remember you well.