Give Thanks & Praise

Holidays still get me. They're supposed to be the best of the best. The best food. The best presents. The best conversation. The best fucking party.

They're always a let down, and due to my nature, I always feel left out, lonely, alone, even when I'm in the company of loved ones. If I'm with friends, they're not cool enough. If I'm with family, I'll find a fault--today it's that we're not big enough.

How can you have a proper Thanksgiving feast with three people? We're too small. Besides, none of us really likes turkey. The only traditional food for this occasion that I really love is exactly what I can't have--the sweets, especially the pies.

My first Thanksgiving, or rather, the first that sticks in my memory, was at Chelsea Lane, in West Hartford, where my grandfather lived. Maybe I was five or six years old. I remember a green quality to the house--maybe the carpet or the wallpaper or both. There were dozens of us there--a whole room of small tables for the kids. The adults spread out around a huge Arthurian round table and ate and drank and laughed loudly. We kids were mostly seen and not really heard, but the grown-ups still treated us warmly. After the feast, we walked to a nearby park. I remember the trees were huge and overhanging. It was a perfect holiday, bursting with good food, good family, and good adventure.

I've never been able to achieve such success since. The next Thanksgiving of note occurred a few years later, at my grandfather's Cape house. This time, we tied up my cousin Annie and tickled her until she threw up. Her parents got grumpy, and that was the last time we all got together. That might have been 1979 or 1980.

Thanksgiving, like all holidays, and like every drug I've ever tried, is as elusive and unattainable as lost youth. No matter how hard I try, I just can't get everything as good as it should be, or as it was the first time. There's nothing in my life's history more intense or profound as my first acid trip, at a Dead Show in Portland, ME in 1986. But the last time I took that shit, it nearly drove me to suicide.

My last relapse was on Thanksgiving night, back in 1999. I had finally surrendered, come clean to the shrink, gotten sober, quit drinking, smoking, and medical-marijuana-ing, and I had suffered through about two weeks of kicking by going to meetings and chanting the Serenity Prayer. Then the feast day came about, at a friend's place in Tucson. There were about eight of us there, and they were all drinking--first good beer, then fine red wine, then finals. When the Frangelico got going, I couldn't say no. I poured myself half a mugful. I recall it was a white coffee mug. My friend Matt and I sat outside on the porch and smoked cigarettes even though neither of us smoked anymore. The syrupy hazelnut flavor and the Camel Light did not compliment each other especially well. I received no escape, no satisfaction from my relapse, though I did think about it a lot over the next few days. Should I share about this in meetings? Is it really a relapse if you just have one? Maybe I can stop at one, after all? Do I confess my failure/crime to my shrink?

On Saturday, God-willing, I will reach the nine year mark in my sobriety. I'm not celebrating. I haven't lined up a chip or a card. There will be no presentation, no canned speech. But the cliche is true--I couldn't do this alone.

So thanks again for sobriety, for the program, for the fellowship. Thanks to my family. It was a nice day. Luke and I had a nice walk down by the shore, and for a few moments, I experienced some real serenity there, looking out over the water, at the sky, at the oysters anchored to rocks in the shallows. But still the sounds of laughter and talking and children's tables and the clinking of silverware and crystal seemed to carry across the bay, over the Boarding School's playing fields, from the corners of weathered homes, from all the parties to which I was never invited.

Next year? This is what I'm doing. I'm running from Thanksgiving. No turkey. No Boarding School. I'm strapping on my skis and hitting the mountain. And that's going to be the new family tradition.