As I sit here on the other side of my Thanksgiving feast, thankful for the meal my partner so lovingly toiled over while himself feeling under the weather, I find myself in the repose of nostalgia. Yesterday, as I busied myself with the doings of work and errands, my eyes fell on my other city dwellers as they made the same movements. All the while, my mind was swirling with the memories flooding of Thanksgiving past, all of my life rushing upwards upon me in a wonder of brilliant clarity.
Most notably, I am recalling how as a high schooler, the day following the turkey feast, I'd board a YMCA bus and head forth to the Pacific Regional Conference, a teen camp held over the Thanksgiving holiday during the nineties(my youth). Excited I was for the experience and more importantly for the reuniting with my summer camp friends who I had not seen for three whole months...(laughable now when I count the decades of our absence from each other, if only we had a PRC now). My mind flutters forward like the flickering of a slide show and I'm a college student finding my way home for the Thanksgiving feast, the airplane and bus ride back to my childhood bedroom, seeing the high school friends as we converse over beers milling where we are now, feeling somehow old in our early twenties, the warm feast around the dining room table, my mother's home cooked meal so vivid to me in the wake of losing her...
It all leads me to fall into the myriad maze of the "whatifs" of past misgivings. The moments that were almost but then were not. As I rode the bus to the YMCA camp, I tried whatever I could to seem aloof from the boy I maintained an active crush throughout our summer camp years only to have him return in our twenties to drunkenly profess his infatuation, then a moment at a cafe one cold December in 2004 that was an "almost but was not". What if it had not been an almost but an actuality, I ask myself nearly to the brink of despair.
Then again, with the passing of my mother, I find myself nostalgic for the moments of my college angst-filled self making her way home for the Thanksgiving meal and weekend, all that transpired during those times. The moments before the feast, during, after, bringing the new romantic partner home for the first time to meet the family and the nervousness behind such doing, the catching up with siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, the warm heart gathering from sleeping in late in your childhood bedroom, the reconnection with high school classmates...
As I walked through the grocery stores, I saw others busy with their preparing and felt a connection, seeing in them the nostalgic memory of past thanksgivings similar to mine. In the darkness of the times we find ourselves, where division seems the given, finding the moment to delve into nostalgia recognizing our similarities within. That is my gratitude.
Autumn leaves falling down like pieces into place
And I can picture it after all these days
And I know it’s long gone and that magic’s not here no more
And I might be ok but I’m not fine at all…
Cause there we are again on that Little town street
You almost ran the red
Cause you were looking over at me
Wind in my hair,
I was there
I remember it all too well
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