I came into the world a little bit too late for Thanksgiving 1947. I was born the wee hours of the following morning. I seem to remember having been told that the stirrings of my imminent arrival were at first mistaken for Thanksgiving dinner rumbling in my mother’s belly. But maybe I made that up.
We lived at the time in my grandparents’ home, an airy, spacious three-story house on Bellevue Avenue in Trenton, New Jersey, just across the street from the Mercer County Hospital where I was taken to be born. Not exactly over-the-river-and-through-the-woods; but it was still a magical place at Thanksgiving time, filled with wonderful aromas from my grandmother’s expert cookery. The house no longer exists. It was torn down at the beginning of 1977, I think to clear space for a parking lot for the hospital. The Trenton Times ran a photo, on the front page if I recall correctly, of the gracious old building succumbing to the wrecking ball.
Don’t we all, sooner or later? All the people who lived with me in that house for my first five years—my parents, my mother’s parents, her unmarried sister—are long dead. Henry, the boy down the street with whom I played and who was my first friend ever, died a few months ago, an indirect victim of the COVID pandemic and the soul-killing isolation it’s imposed on so many of us. I could tell you how old I’ll be at my birthday on Saturday, but I’ll leave you to do the arithmetic for yourself.
My kindergarten was also across the street. My mother long remembered my first day: a tiny little boy led tenderly to school by the hand, by my grandmother, my mother being too sick to accompany me herself. The teacher was a devoutly Christian lady named Miss Warke. She told us Bible stories, read to us from the Bible, which in those days one could do without fear of repercussions. She read to us Psalm 100, which the Bible calls “a psalm of thanksgiving,” and of course my five-year-old mind understood that as capital T, namely my grandmother’s Thanksgiving. Whenever I read that psalm, it’s still intertwined in my mind with the delicious smell of her roast turkey.
Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all ye lands …
Now here we are in a surreal Thanksgiving, unlike any that we who are living can remember. Some of us heed the heart’s call to gather and celebrate, ignoring the warnings of the experts, who after all have been known to be wrong. Others remain in the seclusion that clamped down on us more than eight months ago, perhaps dreaming of better, warmer Thanksgivings past. We’re still reeling from a divisive election that threatens to poison our civic life for years to come. There’s springtime hope on the horizon—those of us who, like me, harbor a strong antipathy to our current president might nevertheless manage a nod of thanks for his administration’s part in bringing us a crop of vaccines in record time—but in the meantime what promises to be a bitter, frightful winter. Something more out of Jeremiah than the Psalms.
… Serve the Lord with gladness:
Come before His presence with singing.
Know ye that the Lord, He is God;
It is He that hath made us, and not we ourselves;
We are His people, and the sheep of His pasture.
Enter into His gates with thanksgiving,
And into His courts with praise;
Be thankful unto Him, and bless His name.
For the Lord is good, His mercy is everlasting;
And His truth endureth to all generations.
Do you have your doubts as to whether the Lord is indeed God, or anything at all beyond the wishful thinking of humans afraid of the (seasonal) dark and wanting to be led through it by the hand, as my long-deceased grandmother led me across the street? Are you inclined to suspect that we are fashioned, neither by Him nor by ourselves, but through unimaginable eons of the blindness, cruelty and terror that we call “nature”? I won’t say that it doesn’t matter—it does. But it’s not the only thing that matters.
Mercy is indeed everlasting, truth enduring. They will remain so as long as our species remains human, as it will long after you and I have departed the scene. Of all the things we have to be thankful for this Thanksgiving, these are perhaps the greatest and the best.
