“Even the beauty … seems to crumble….”: Thanksgiving Road Trips
“In middle age there is mystery,” writes John Cheever in the first his published diary entries, referring to some unspecified feeling on an unspecified date in 1952. “There is mysterification. The most I can make out of this hour is a kind of loneliness. Even the beauty of the visible world seems to crumble, yes even love. I feel there has been some miscarriage, some wrong turning, but i do not know when it took place and I have no hope of finding it…”
Neither do I.
“Here, here,” said Caroline when I read the entry to her on Thanksgiving morning, the weird holiday questions hovering: whose cooking, whose coming, who can’t make it, memories, deja vu, reminders, some more welcome than others, hovering in the air. Penelope used to be here leading the charge, with multiple families converging in her kitchen. Dad was there pouring the wine. Tom was with us holding court. Now they are flashbacks. The trips to join the meal stretch back through my mind, through our lives. I remember a fall day, driving Dad’s car from Chicago through the snow to Minnesota, trying to make it on time, spinning into a ditch, late for the meal, a broken tie. Leon Lett fumbled. The Ditchdigger met me for drinks after walking through the FDR estate, ending our family trip up to the Mohonk, back in town, here and there all those years ago. My memories, everyone’s lists, names, joys and catastrophes.
Sarah might come, with all the memories of Georgia.
But she can’t make it, she told me the night before.
The teenager arrived the night before and we stayed up late watching movies.
After reading Cheever together, I got kicked out of the kitchen before the cooking began. Rode to Red Hook with the kids, stopping for a key lime pie, and a glimpse of the water at Valentino pier. Looking at the waves, the sun reflecting, I wrote a poem in my mind. How would you write about this moment, I asked the teenager. Referring to the tides ahead, the little one orated about gardens bulldozed and conodos rising, lampooning dad’s clumsy poetics, offering up something funnier, in their own story, our story, as we watched the waves, the metaphysical pier connecting the land and water, stories between here and there, still stumbling for the right words.
Rode back, made some banana bread.
And Irwin and Damian and Evelyn and Eamian and Al and Joss and Mav and Wiley dropped by.
And we talk about the Jazz Messengers and Lee Morgan, his partner Helen, unpacking the mystery that grasped them in the Harlem snow as that fateful noreaster that gripped the city, feet of snow piled on the sidewalk the night he left that evening 51 years ago.
Irwin called the jazz standards, Cherokee and Caravan, on the playlist from memory. And the conversation bubbled into the evening. Al held court. Mav listened. Damian talked about the Lower East Side.
By nightfall, the guests left.
Another round arrived.
And Max and I talked about our favorite Cowboys quarterbacks. Still looking gorgeous, Dolly Parton leads the halftime show.
And food comas set in.
Next morning, Mom joined us. And we drive North, past Cheever’s in Ossining, in Westchester County, beyond FDR’s house, to Millerton. And looked for coffee before arriving at our lakehouse in Copate, in Columbia County. The sun descended into the evening. Card games, we dueled through trivial pursuit, giggles, ups and downs, holiday blues, with odd dislocated feelings hovering.
I looked through the old books, Graham Green stories, Jack Kerouac novels, pulling one off the shelf.
“Tears came to Gerard’s eyes” moved by what he saw, Jack wrote in Vision of Gerard, in the first two weeks of 1956, tracing the story of his life, one novella at a time.
The ducks swam across the water of Robertson Lake.
I wrote some notes. And thought about the journals that people keep, first drafts of the stories of our lives, of John Cheever’s stories and novels, my poems that the little one giggles at, the intersections and entangmements of struggles and memories of childhood, Bear’s prose, still reminding me.
Mom and I talked about past holidays. She told me about the kid who lost his shoes making him late to her papa’s Christmas breakfast in 1944, that we are still talking about all these years later.
Countless stories are lodged in the journals of our minds.
I’m looking for them, wondering if they can find their way into the light of day.
And if so in what form?
Grandma recalled kids who left her home town to fight the war over morning coffee.
And we make our way out for a hike to Bash Bish Falls, a waterfall in the Taconic Mountains, on a day of hiking, thrifting, exploring hamlets, glimpsing crumbling buildings, disappearing, a little lunch and reading and lots and lots of leftovers.
Looking at the water and the trees, I think of Bash-Bish, the Mohican blamed for indescretions and punished, sent careening over the falls into oblivion, butterflies over her head as she disappeared into the water, the falls haunted to this day.
We stay up late playing monopoly, reading and talking, catching up on college homework. Mom’s tired. Its a lot of these trips. The kids look about wondering why they are still here. Everything changes.
Sunday morning light greets us the next day, reflections on the pond, between the trees.. A hot coffee for two, words of John Cheever and pumpkin pie with mom, welcome the day. Packing up, we start the journey back - through the morning, past red barns, farms, rivers, winter light shining on industrial waters, on a quiet day, with the crew. Down through the country, into Harlem, along the East River, over the Brooklyn Bridge, first stop Brooklyn, before the rain. Then Princeton to drop mom off, with a spritzer and a final round of leftovers and chat, one more of a lifetime of Thanksgivings.
Drizzle on the way back to Brooklyn, protesters are blocking the Manhattan Bridge.
Back home, La Femme Nikita and Christina F in Decoder light up the evening cinema, reminding us that old lives are hard to shake or decode, everything changing, the beauty crumbling, ever transforming. They were the movies to see. Get to the theater, we told ourselves.That was years before. Now, we tell our kids.
We know there's plenty to reconcile with our dark history, past friends, and mistakes, yet from time to time there is also light, family, and friends from far and wide.
Reflecting on the weekend, with the teenager joining us from LA, mom taking the road trip, even with her age, reading old poems, one after the next, I find myself sitting with Harold Bloom. He’s talking about “A Shropshire Lad, XL” by A. E. Housman, referring to that place none of are ever able to get back to, that “universal longing,” the childhood the kids have now left, the Christmas dinners with Papa Mom used to enjoy all those years ago, all those Thanksgiving meals, that changed all of us:
“That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.”
By Tuesday, the teenager and their older sister walked out of the house, joined by dad, making their way through the cold, to the subway, saying goodbye, onto respective directions, one to senior year in Manhattan, the other to the airport, the next steps in their lives.
Walking back, I saw a group of birds hovering in a tree on Hoyt Street, bright yellow leaves strewn about, stopping to greet them before they flew away.
