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Thanksgiving 2003
The idea of looking for meaning in a meaningless world was underscored by the kid in the pantry when he said, "what's the use?" in response to his mother's admonishment and subsequent offer of compromise.
I was going to tell the kid the use but it gets complicated and its hard to be sure how to say it exactly and it really gets difficult when trying to explain it to someone so much closer to immortality, as children know themselves to be.
But kid, as I see it, the use is to simply be, to survive every onslaught, and absorb as much or a little more than as much as you can stand and then give something back so that you don't become a human black hole.
I celebrated Thanksgiving with other humans this year. Contrary to my affinity for solitary existence I enjoy humans pretty well, obviously some more than others, but the repetitive action of interpreting new personalities and approximating appropriate response has left me feeling, while somewhat satisfied, totally frayed.
Of course I medicated throughout with deep breaths and alcohol, one day having my first Guinness shortly after noontime, and my last shorty before 10 pm. And then there's that surprising emotion of missing people once they are gone which I am not as experienced dealing with as perhaps I should be.
I called my nearly ninety-year-old mother Thanksgiving night, ashamedly I admit only after being prodded to, and she is doing fine but seemed a little frail, and the deterioration of her memory is not a completely new thing but I hated hearing it over the phone, my least favorite communication device. I guess she was forgetting that rarity of rarities, my recent writing to her, with return address clearly marked on envelope, and we danced shyly and awkwardly around the fact that it was proving to be a rather difficult task for her to hear, remember, and write down the five numbers of my Rappahannock zip code. Of course why should any mother have to remember so many addresses? Why won't that son just stay put somewhere?
As I think of all the addresses I may inhabit over the next several months I look forward for better or worse to the blur of uncertainty. If I just remember to keep those frayed edges trimmed I'll be okeedokey.