Giving thanks for the future
“Here’s to what the future brings. I hope tomorrow you’ll find better things ...” — The Kinks
Iwas supposed to eat Thanksgiving dinner in Pittsburgh today. But life intervened quick and cold and I’ll end up passing the candied yams with Mom and Dad back home in Baltimore. Ah, the great Cathedral of Mirrors in which we put so much faith: Supposed To …
By definition, Thanksgiving is a backward-looking holiday, a day to acknowledge what we have, however meager or fleeting. I have a friend whose prayers include daily thanks for what has been given, what has been lost and, most importantly, how she can best put to use what remains.
Thanksgiving has long been my favorite holiday; no gifts but a groaning board before which Americans of all denominations practice, if only for a few hours, the simplest of spiritual principles: Thank you.
This year, I’d like to honor the last Thursday in November by looking forward, far beyond the noise of this American moment, to break bread with gratitude’s more complicated sibling: Optimism.
A few of my acquaintances who have served time in prison say that one of the biggest challenges of incarceration is the noise — endless, inane noise. And yet another friend, who runs in the same circles as the “what remains” woman, often reminds himself that his life improved greatly when he got out of the “May I?” queue to stand in the “thank you” line.
I’ve made these friends over many years in a most radical “Optimists Club,” the one where people hang around coffee urns in church basements, patiently working their way back into society from ruin. On the walls, you might see a sign promoting “Confidence in the Future.” Or this one, much more difficult to believe: “Everything works out in the end. If it hasn’t, then it’s not the end.”
This is not simple hope, it’s hard-core optimism. The difference between the two is measured by time.
Hope — filtered through our wants and needs, often booby-trapped with the delusion of “supposed to”— is directed at unknown outcomes in a given moment. Optimism is something people take with them into every moment, no matter how dire.
It seems to me (or at least has been true for me) that the deep well of optimism can be replenished by adding a touch of silliness — though not too much, for the carbonation of childishness is a powerful intoxicant.
I’m reminded of this when I think back to the only time I’ve seen my father cry, four days before Thanksgiving in 1971 when I was 13 years old. My brother and I were watching the Three Stooges on a black-and-white Zenith when the phone rang. It was Mom calling from the hospital — her father, a brewery worker named William Zaminski Jones, had just died.
Danny and I turned off the TV and sat at the kitchen table, watching Dad as he spoke softly on the green phone on the wall. He said he was very sorry, and that we would meet her right away. As he hung up, a single tear ran down his left cheek, just like the one that creased the face of the Italian-American actor Iron Eyes Cody when he portrayed a heartbroken “Indian” in an anti-littering ad which debuted that year. The three of us hopped into the old man’s canary yellow ‘66 Mustang and drove off.
In the car, either me or Danny — who was 11 — began singing a ridiculous ditty from the Stooges episode we’d been watching when “Pop” passed away: “Zee Lollipop” song from the 1938 short “Wee Wee Monsieur.” And then we sang it again. And again.
“Zee lollipop, zee lollipop, zee lol-lol-lol-li-pop — WOO HOO!”
Soon, Dad joined in and it was the three of us — Moe, Larry and Curly of our own making — repeating the song’s only lyrics as we drove through East Baltimore toward a narrow rowhouse — the home of my father’s parents, where I now live — to meet Mom after she left the hospital.
“Zee lollipop, zee lollipop, zee lol-lol-lol-li-pop – WOO HOO!”
Turning onto Macon Street, Dad said, “OK, we have to cut it out now.”
[Remember: silliness / optimism / intoxication and the instructions of the mad scientists who wind up being grateful for a cup of cheap coffee in a church basement: ADD MORE!]
Looking back, I find it important that when we were singing — especially Curly’s trademark exclamation at the end — “Woo Hoo!”
— Dad was not just playing with his boys to kill time, he was in it, he was with us. The tear which he’d shed just a few moments before (surely in response to my mother’s sobbing on the other end) had met its match, if only for a moment.
The following year, a few weeks before Thanksgiving, Mom gave birth to a third son, Victor. From that day on, when talk of her father came up — funny stories about his habitual drinking, stories only amusing in the re-telling — it was from the distance that a new life had put between her and the loss.
Today, my first grandchild — a boy named Augustine, born in Melville’s “city of Manhattoes, belted round by wharves” — is 12 days old. If he lives as long as my Mom and Dad — who last week celebrated their 65th wedding anniversary — Gus will amble into the 22nd century, now nothing more than an expanse of blank canvas.
But the epoch in which this child arrived is a dark one for this country and the world and I cannot alter the timing of his birth — set long before his parents were born — any more than I can wish away the aches in my knees.
One of these days, when the time is right, I’m going to teach him “Zee Lollipop” song.