CHRIST IN WINTER:
Reflections on Faith and Life for the Years of Winter…
This is the first
Thanksgiving Day [TD] that Helen and I have spent alone in 59 years of
marriage. We are thankful for that, both to spend the day alone, together, and
for all those TDs we spent with family and friends.
Until our daughters were
grown, of course, TD was at our house-often with my parents and my brother and
his wife-or at one of the grandparent houses. After they married, Katie and her
family have always gone to her husband’s family on TD, and since we always
lived where they lived, once grandchildren were available, nobody was home for
TD with us, so we usually spent TD with older daughter, Mary Beth, either at
our house or hers, in Chicago, usually in the company of her friends.
Sometimes, though, MB would
be at the Cleveland home of old friend Chris Rander, who is a marvelous TD cook
and often came to Chicago to cook TD dinner for her and us. On her Cleveland
TDs we would work community Thanksgiving meals for the hungry and homeless,
usually delivering meals to shut-ins, because we were good at finding obscure
places. Now anybody can find an obscure place, because of the GPS voice in the
dashboard, but navigation was a skill then.
We weren’t alone, together,
on those community meal TDs. We were in the midst of a bustling bunch of
do-gooders, with whom we would finally sit down in a church basement or
hospital cafeteria and eat the food we had not delivered or served up earlier.
Helen would talk recipes with the women. I would talk football with the
teen-age boys.
When I was a student at
Perkins School of Theology at SMU, it was too far to go home for TD, so we
hosted the other misplaced students from IN, and their children, at Rankin, the
community center that we directed, in a Dallas barrio. Merle and Judy Lehman
and little daughter, Debbie, Jack and Cora Divine, Doug and Helen Gatton, Bob
Parsons. We were a long way from home, but we were not alone.
All those were good TDs,
days for which to be thankful, to be with family or friends. This is a
different sort of day. No bustling, because Helen has done most of the cooking
ahead of time. No little dog to sit patiently for hours in the middle of the
kitchen, watching through the oven’s steamy glass window as the turkey cooks.
No one with whom to bend over the new jigsaw puzzle-one of our TD
traditions-until we can’t straighten up. No grandchildren with red cheeks and
happy faces.
A different sort of day,
for which I am thankful.
JRMcF
I tweet occasionally as
yooper1721.
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