Oat-Turkey and Other Remote Possibilities

Thus far, this column has afforded me a fine opportunity to grouse, dither and alienate advertisers, but I thought this might be a good day to instead address a few of the things I’m thankful for.

Why, there’s a holiday weekend full of them: Clint-a-thons, Bullwinkle-blasts, dinosaur-thons, a “Jonny Quest” marathon! Not to mention “Twilight Zone,” “I Love Lucy” and “Mystery Science Theater 3,000” marathons. And for those of you who think Thanksgiving programming is straying too far from the spirit of the holiday, there’s a “Hogan’s Heroes” marathon. With such a warm glow coming from the TV, who even needs a family?

While there are those who will remember Thanksgiving as the day when the Oilers met the Lions, for most it celebrates the time centuries ago when hungry pilgrims learned that turkeys weren’t just loving pets.

For me, this day will mark the first, and entirely petrifying, time I’ve attempted to host Thanksgiving dinner for my family.

Although I’ve technically been an adult since Gerald Ford was steering the presidential golf cart, the peripheral rock-and-roll lifestyle I’ve followed has left me a mite ill-prepared for proper hosting. As you’re reading this Thursday, for example, I’m expecting that eight or more family members will be over, and I do not, at this writing, have anything that especially resembles a chair for any of them to sit on. This is the fallout from a lifetime of thinking that Fender amps counted as furniture. Maybe I’ll just suggest we sit “Indian style” on the floor in honor of American Indians, from whom the thankful European settlers got pumpkin, corn and the entire continent.

When my folks or more stable siblings have held Thanksgiving, it’s sometimes fallen to me to carve the turkey, which under my deft hand ends up looking like shredded newspaper or those bits of frayed tire you see by the roadside. My girlfriend is a vegetarian, so I’m tempted to forgo the bird and try getting by with oatmeal, which maybe we could form into a vague turkey shape. I have a pretty firm handle on doing cold cereal, so this might not be too big a stretch.

One thing I’m seriously thankful for is that my family has weathered far worse recently than my assaults on their palates, and we seem to have grown closer for it. That, as best I can figure, is something of a widespread trend.

I know few people lately who haven’t been having a harder life. And as much as things may look more hopeless in the big picture--with machine gun-toting kids grabbing the streets and huge corporations grabbing everything else--on a personal level, I’m seeing plenty more examples of people showing what humanity can rise to. Little of it is headline stuff; it’s mostly just the small but sufficient ways friends show they care or strangers risk helping one another.

I have a musician friend who was telling me years ago how much he was looking forward to the ‘90s. He thought our society was going to get so out of control and life would get so hard that if people were going to bother living through it, they’d have to reacquaint themselves with the things that make living worthwhile. He’s looking to see more foot traffic than freeways, more front porch sing-alongs than stadium shows, more people being upfront and honest than accepting of the consensual lies we’ve gotten by on.

I think we’re starting to see that. Certainly an argument could be made that the opposite is true. You don’t need psychic credentials to sense the edge of fear that’s out there because of the economy. There’s more tension on the job. There’s the suspicion our government is working for someone else, given that in the past 12 years 6% of the nation’s total wealth shifted to the wealthiest 1% of our population, which already had controlled 31%. There’s less warmth and creativity in everything from pop music to housing, and Orange County may well take the cake for having the most soulless sprawls of identical, profit-maximized condos in the world. (If there were truth in advertising, these tracts alongside the freeways would fly banners reading, “If you lived here, you’d keep driving.”)

But at the same time, there’s more to be thankful for. Some months back OC Live! did an interview with folk singer and storyteller U. Utah Phillips, who has made a life of traveling this nation and hearing its voices. A former hobo and lifelong Wobbly, he’s attuned to the hardships people are enduring, but also pointed to the candor with which problems are now being addressed, and to the neighborhood networks of food banks, crisis centers and shelters helping people. “Maybe we’ve won and just don’t know it,” he suggested.

Nearly everywhere I look, I’m seeing individuals who aren’t waiting for Washington or Hollywood to lead the way and are creating their own means of making this a livelier place to live. I do another column in the View section called Fixations, where I’ve stumbled across people who break into song on buses, who use department store trash to teach abused kids to recycle cast-offs into art, who write thought-provoking messages on their trucks.

For most of my life, holidays with my family have followed the accepted form, with substance being an optional thing. Lately, we’ve been saying to hell with the pre-fab conventions, gifts and mall bustle and are enjoying each other more. I just hope they like oatmeal.

One of my friends comes from a family that never quite got the feel for traditional Thanksgiving festivities. It’s some indication his own household is similarly disposed that they’re spending today having a lasagna picnic in Death Valley.

Coincidentally, the musician friend I mentioned has his own separate plans and reasons for also being in Death Valley today. He recently read Mary Crow Dog’s “Lakota Woman,” a very human and vivid account of the injustices still practiced against American Indians. Given centuries of such betrayals, my friend figures a holiday based on the Indians’ early trust of the white man is not a thing he can celebrate. So he’s taking leave of his family and driving from Northern California to the desert.

He’s entirely right, but at the same time, I think he’s being entirely too stiff on this occasion. A holiday is what you make it: a pious observance of tradition, a TV cathode ray bath, or a chance to share a little warmth between friends and family, which is not a thing to pass up these days. It’s a big desert, but I’m hoping he winds up with some lasagna.