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Thursday – Thanksgiving
Today the Bateses and the Degens will celebrate Thanksgiving with a family gathering that has been held every year, with only occasional exceptions, since 1954. That was the year the Bateses moved to Sewanee. Our fathers were newly hired professors and our mothers met on Phoebe Bates’s full day here, when she formed a friendship with Eileen Degen that lasted the rest of their lives. The Bates boys and the Degen girls grew up together, and although we went our separate ways after high school, we have been reuniting since Julia and I retired here. Cathy comes up from Tuscaloosa, Alabama and Barbara down from Alexandria, Virginia to stay in the house they inherited from their parents. In other words, our joint family Thanksgivings have survived our parents.
But of course we are keenly aware of all who can no longer join us. Every year, it seems, our numbers diminish. My brother David died earlier this year, and Barbara lost a brother-in-law just this past week, so our joy at being together will be tinged with melancholy. Linda Pastan’s “Home for Thanksgiving” captures such mixed feelings.
In the family Thanksgiving she describes, she is intensely aware of the passage of time: it is late afternoon and “the light is wasting away.” As it grows darker, individuals become silhouettes, just as, when they die, they become memories. The poem provides two images of death, one dark, one less so. “Wasting away” suggests illness, and the silhouettes are harsh as death is harsh, stripping away our rich complexity. Yet the tone modulates toward the poem’s ending as daughters removing their aprons are compared to trees shedding their leaves. A lifetime of work will ultimately lead to a final rest that is part of nature’s cycle of life.
Knowing that all this will pass, Pastan tells us that we should “fill ourselves up.” It’s Horace’s injunction to seize the moment. When she advises us to “eat quickly,” maybe she has in mind the Passover feast (the author is Jewish), which was eaten hurriedly prior to a long journey into the unknown. The reference to albums closing may be to the photo albums that record past Thanksgivings and in which may be how we ourselves are remembered. Yet the evanescence of life makes the present moment all the more precious.
We are deeply grateful that we have had such gatherings with loved ones in the past and that we continue to do so. Happy Thanksgiving!
Home for Thanksgiving
By Linda Pastan
The gathering family
throws shadows around us,
it is the late afternoon
of the family.
There is still enough light
to see all the way back,
but at the windows
that light is wasting away.
Soon we will be nothing
but silhouettes: the sons’
as harsh
as the fathers’.
Soon the daughters
will take off their aprons
as trees take off their leaves
for winter.
Let us eat quickly—
let us fill ourselves up.
The covers of the album are closing
behind us.
