Thursday, November 24, 2005

To Your Health

Thanksgiving. It was always a grand holiday where the family would join hands before the meal and say at least one thing that we were each thankful for. Most of us could think of far more than one thing, and it was always a great time just before Christmas to kiss up to the rest of the family, but mom and dad always looked at my sister and I and said that they were thankful we were healthy. Later, once we’d left home for college, mom and dad’s thankful declarations would tend to begin with how happy they just were that we’d come home to visit, and the whole good health thing sort of became secondary, or implied. Sure, there was kind of an unspoken parental guilt attached to that new “Home for the Holidays” thanks, almost an unsubtle threat in case we ever tried to escape our holiday obligations, but it was always spoken with a warm heart.

Families collect stories, and Thanksgiving is a natural generator of stories. There was the year dad bought a turkey that was too large to fit in the oven, or the year the turkey wasn’t fully cooked till 10 PM because no one turned on the stove. One constant of my childhood was having the Detroit Lions football team break my heart year after year. I would sit there and watch as they always seemed to discover a new formula for self-defeat. Sure, in Michigan New Year’s day meant witnessing yet another Rose Bowl defeat for the Wolverine’s, but Thanksgiving Day was strictly reserved for watching my Lions get carved up and served to an opponent. Of course, in later years I realized that the rest of the nation only paid attention to the far more interesting Dallas Cowboy game that would follow. Ah, good times.

So what am I thankful for? Now that I have my own family, and my own son, I realize you are always thankful for your child’s health, you just tend to keep it inside till a holiday allows you to speak what you’ve been silently thinking the other three hundred and sixty-four days of the year. And as for today, November 24, 2005: the Detroit Lions lost to the Atlanta Falcons 27-7. Ah, Thanksgiving… good times.

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