Thanksgiving 2020

It's a weird one.

I woke up grateful, so it's only natural that it went downhill from there.  My oldest is furious about something (anything?) and spent the better part of 1.5 hours screaming and crying, some of it whilst perambulating around the neighborhood so as to better maximize public humiliation.  My youngest has decided not to nap.  And my husband is the world's worst kitchen parter, nitpicking, complaining, asking passive-aggressive questions, and generally getting in the way, all while contributing nothing of actual utility (I've known this for a long time, and it is why we cook separately; unfortunately the kitchen doors do not lock). 

Everyone is "napping" right now, which means that no one is sleeping, but we have all retreated to our separate corners.  Everyone will probably be more civil when we come back together, plus by then it will be a couple of hours closer to bedtime.

But even in the midst of this domestic bliss, there is much to be grateful for.  The obligatory: we are healthy, we are solvent, there is pie.  And the bonuses: My daughter sings in her crib.  My son loves to make his sister laugh.  I am making a decent living at a vocation I believe in and enjoy.   I grew up with love, and I am passing love on.

This particular COVID Thanksgiving, when I must keep my distance from everyone outside of my immediate family, I'm also finding myself reflecting on those moments in which people outside of my household -strangers, friends, and acquaintances- have given me something charged and precious, some vision or warning or advice that inflected my life, showed me how to be or what to do.

K, telling me her vision of me, blazing and brave.  H picking me up in the rain. Professor B, taking me out to lunch and telling me I didn't want to be a musicologist (I didn't).  N showing me how crouch calmly under the table when the SWAT team began to roll past the coffee shop.  My student E gripping my hands the weekend I was waiting on my son's muscular dystrophy test, telling me things would be different, but OK.  C, one of my first students at my very first workshop, who told me I was a wonderful teacher.

We change the direction of one another's lives glancingly, unconsciously. We hit and run, hustling past our impacts, never entirely perceiving what we are to one another.  We are molecules, drifting and jostling; we are nothing much.  We are everything.