Giving Thanks

The Thanksgiving holiday gave us four full days with just each other after two months of coming and going. Like previous years, we each don’t get enough time away from work and school for travel to and from the tables of family, so we set and sat at our own. We prepared less than last year, though still enough food to feed the entire 9th floor. Which is the point of Thanksgiving, I suppose.

We usually make a fairly big deal of being thankful, each of us expressing our personal gratitudes, but we didn’t do much of that this year. It’s not that we don’t have lots to be thankful for — we’re in better shape than many these days, what with all the banks on fire and us both having jobs (for the moment, anyway). But given all that's happened lately, it's hard to feel appreciative for what we have when it's effortless to feel otherwise for what we've lost. It's hard to give thanks without being thankful, hard even to go through the motions of thanking.

But, as always, Q & The Boy apply salve to our sorrows. After we sit down to eat, the Boy tries everything on the table and finds himself really loving the fresh cranberry sauce and stuffing. We share a toast to family, clinking our wine with their fizzy grape juice, and Q savors her special drink almost comically. I say "almost" because she's sincere in tipping her glass all the way back and tapping the last drops onto her purple tongue.

And that's their secret, I guess. My wife and I look at this moment and can't help but see it in the arc of others — the many great meals we've had with family and the future ones just made impossible. But they are right here right now and for just this time.

I am truly thankful for that.