Thanks
I’ve been convinced it was Thanksgiving for about five weeks now. I go to the grocery store and I swear it’s suffused with the hush and hurry of last-minute shopping before the store closes early for the holiday. I have fleeting fantasies about the people in line, imagining them arriving at a warm house where everybody knows them, taking off their coats and setting down a tinfoil-wrapped dish on the nearest available surface. I see their faces lit up with smiles instead of the irritated hard set of the mouth typical of midweek grocery runs. I wonder if they’ll get to spend it with people they weren’t able to see last year. I think back to last Thanksgiving, when I stole away to a remote Airbnb with a couple friends, still unsure if it was okay for us to breathe the same air. I hope for this one to be brighter and bigger, with a crowded table of too many kinds of carbs and our cat stealing food when no one’s watching and a stupendously messy apartment at the end of the night.
Maybe this holiday fixation is just a manifestation of my obsession with time this fall. I’ve been urging the calendar forward, eager to tick off ten weeks, twelve weeks, sixteen weeks. The passage of time makes me feel safer. I feel it giving the life inside of me an increasingly stronger hold on the world. I’ve barely dared to imagine the person that is becoming in there or what next year could look like with this person. Because there’s nothing I can do to bring that about, I set upon the holidays with determination, planning the near future so that the further unknown will inch closer as well.
Holidays signify time passing and also encapsulate periods of time, standing out as bright points of memory surrounded by the forgotten mundanity of the everyday. When I think back to my childhood, my memories are anchored by Thanksgivings and Christmases and Easters. When I try to imagine the future with a child, it’s mostly holidays that I picture, trick-or-treating or cutting out paper snowflakes. That isn’t to say that I don’t know that most of parenting will be monotonous days of getting them ready for school and checking on their homework. But a new mundane is so much more difficult to picture than a special day.
I live in memories and projections more than I should. I can wander through a day not quite there, unless something potent drags me back to the present. At least I can channel this impulse into cooking and meal planning. So many of my recipes begin as dreams or wishes for a certain kind of feeling. They do culminate, in the end, in something real. The meal, the people, draw me away from my fantasies and at least for a moment, I can be thankful for what I have right now. I think my future will unfurl this way too, never quite what I imagine but enough to anchor me in it.