Lessons learnt from Thanksgiving

Hello dear reader, I hope you enjoyed giving thanks somewhere yesterday, officially or not…

I had three invitations in the end, so took up the first offer, which was a slap-up meal in the clubhouse at the old people’s mobile home park where my good friends Iben and Harlow live. I say “old”, but anyone who is over 55 can live here, and as I am creeping toward that venerable age myself I might have to revise my notion of it to a “mature (and wise) people’s mobile home park”. Iben has done a top-notch job doing up a second mobile house, previously home/storage to an interesting hoarder I wrote about here, where her son Morten and his girlfriend Julie are staying.

We three turned up a little late after a long bike ride, all mixed up about the time. But we were still welcomed to lots of food and smiles. We discovered that there are several very nice things to be thankful for when being entertained in a mature and wise people’s clubhouse:

I felt so YOUNG! Like, the second youngest person in the whole place! One of only three people without white hair!! This doesn’t happen very often any more. I have a little game I make my same-aged friends play with me, which is to look around the subway carriage/restaurant/street and see how many people are older than us. Often it is no one! Morals from this tale: life goes by astonishingly fast (it feels like I was 30 just a week ago and yet I’ll be old enough to join them all in the twink of an eye!), and old age is relative. Even amongst the white-haired crowd, there was a large enough diversity if you looked carefully enough (I think I rarely do look at groups of old people carefully enough) – some were sitting very still on oxygen, some were charging around socializing, for example.

The food was GREAT and plentiful! Which is what you’d expect from fifty ladies of that generation, who still actually know how to cook. (The elderly gentlemen seemed to be mainly in charge of providing the wine, which added even more jollity and flushed cheeks to an already rather friendly occasion). The food was also FREE! Moral of the tale: kindness of strangers.

We had DESSERT followed by DESSERT! 90 percent of the dishes were sweet: sweet potato, sweet corn, marshmallows and yam, pineapple upside down bake, ten varieties of cranberry sauce … all followed by apple pie, pumpkin pie, pecan pie, rice pudding, ice cream, chocolate peppermint brownies, etc. I tried to label or impute “main meal” on my first course, but it wasn’t happening. Even the salad was sweet. So I decided that I’d happily go with dessert followed by more dessert as a special pre-diabetic-coma treat. Moral of the tale: “main course” and “dessert” are mere imputations of the mind with no existence in and of themselves.

We got an amusing, in-your-face lesson on IMPERMANENCE AND EMPTINESS! Like I said, we were a little late, but we were still not expecting our meal to be cut short in quite the way it was. We were in full-on eating mode, tucking into copious amounts of food, with all the time in the world, when several ladies came to our table and started to hover right over us, leaning across the table to point out their crockery and cutlery. “That’s my plate, do you mind if I take it, you have finished haven’t you?” grabbing at the plate currently supporting Morten’s small mountain of food … Julie diplomatically transferred M’s food onto another side dish nearby, and off his plate was whisked, followed shortly thereafter by Julie’s…. Some more speedy negotiations and re-arrangements on that side of the table, and then they came for me… they wanted my fork mid-bite, so I transferred to another one, but someone else wanted that, so I transferred to a third, and then three rushed mouthfuls later someone else wanted that too, so I realized the game was up. I had clearly eaten enough apple pie for the time being. Meanwhile, Iben transferred her coffee into no fewer than three mugs, ending up with a paper cup to be on the safe side. The food, once spread splendidly all over the table, was now all squashed into an odd assortment of side plates and paper cups, with just a couple of plastic utensils to eat it with! Moral of the tale:We realized the impermanence of all good things, watching everything dissolve away into emptiness before our eyes… (though I’m still waiting for my big belly to dissolve away into emptiness …)

(Careful what you wish for… I just this moment received a text message inviting my cat and me to a late Thanksgiving feast at another friend’s house tonight … not necessarily what I had in mind when I called the last article “Let Every Day be Thanksgiving”! My diet will have to wait…)