Even this year, there is room for gratitude

Thanksgiving is a time to pause, whisper thanks and appreciate the gift of survival

In a jacked-up year, “thanks” seems so out of step and sounds so out of tune.

And yet we’ve landed on our own personal Plymouth Rock this Thanksgiving Day — pilgrims in search of a new start, boat passengers tossed about in successive waves of pandemics, some self-inflicted, others coronavirus-ly targeted and deadly.

We give thanks this day, though the turkey is splayed — thighs, shoulders and breast sliced apart and sent to three, four and five homes for solitary consumption on a day meant for communal feasting. Public health officials have so decreed.

Thanks, yes, because though the tribe count numbers thousands fewer than at the last Thanksgiving in the Great White North, our neighbours to the south lose members by the hundreds of thousands, all the while declining basic safety measures, defying common sense, denying non-partisan science.

We whisper “thanks” that our leaders are not so hidebound and blatantly disrespectful of our lives to sacrifice us on the altar of political expedience; and we whisper a prayer of deliverance in time for their November Thanksgiving.

It’s been a long time — months — of quarantined existence. Many churches still locked; schools open, sort of. We paint wide circles on park grass to facilitate distancing.

Encampments of homeless denizens spring up in public space, uncomfortably, forcing us to confront the crisis that sees thousands of empty Airbnbs casting shadow on offending tents and tenements. Are the encampments legal? Is the city’s attempt to rouse them humane in its execution? That the question is raised at all is a gift, something to be thankful for.

Even in this jacked-up year of lockdowns and wipeouts, virtuality replacing reality and making a case for permanence when the pandemic ends, there is room for gratitude.

Each wave of public and private turbulence is followed by a rest, a pause.

Consider this Thanksgiving, Oct. 12, Covid-2020, as a period to catch one’s breath and appreciate the gift of survival.

COVID, you took my hugs and knowing shrugs, masked my loves and shrouded them in stillness and blank stares. You built an invisible wall, a virtual barricade turned viral screen that shields and separates and protects and propagates fear with each protective pane of plastic. And I embrace the emptiness, or ingest my demise.

Kinfolk marry and give birth and we miss the pleasure of shared milestones that give life meaning and context. Moms whisper raspy last words, alone in nursing homes (“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death …”) and doting daughters weep behind the barricade, unable to wipe the cold sweat of death from mama’s clammy brow or finish the Shepherd Psalm with “I will fear no evil, for thou art with me.”

Is there a greater evil than to lose a friend who saved your life — and be told, no, you are not one of the five who can grieve by his fallen remains? Keep your distance.

And yet, the spirit soars this morning when the sun rises and the sweep of foliage colour the valley a spectacular mélange of autumn brown, manic red and giddy yellow. A simple pleasure is not supposed to set aside sadness so easily. But it does. And, despite the tinge of guilt, this is a blessing.

Gardeners know this. For every pain we bury, a joy prepares to burst out of the ground and capture the heart with arresting beauty. We’ve buried a lot of pain in 2020. Today, it feels right to pause and recall the flashes of goodness, the things to be thankful for.

For me, it’s the graciousness of Star readers and their capacity to love and empathize and voice their support.

Around this year’s second pandemic — the wretched and exhausting weight of antiBlack racism — Star readers were overwhelming in their support when I bared my soul to express the perennial fears and despair my clan experience.

Normally, my mentor David Lewis Stein would be my pickme-up. We buried David two summers ago.

You filled in admirably. Thank you.

Back in April, as coronavirus raged in New York City, I wrote that my pregnant daughter was going crazy with fear of delivering a baby in a Brooklyn hospital that has COVID-19 deaths in body bags along the hospital hallways and in cooler trucks outside.

I get chills thinking about the number of you who sent an email to say, “Awful situation. Saying a little prayer for your girl.”

Thank you. It’s a boy. Kihyan. Now, two months. I’m blessed.

For every death — and there have been too many and too few real funerals (Michael, Joycee, Cherilyn, Wayne, Ken, Clinton) — there is a Luke turning one, and a Kaiden turning two, serenading grandpa with the sweet sound of “Papi.”

Life’s good. Life’s short. Life’s unpredictable. Life’s sure to show you all its confounding faces. Long ago I learned a song that sustains and transforms:

“In everything, give thanks,” it says. Put that to any tune this Thanksgiving.