Pilgy the Pilgrim awaits the guests, in his dual roles as Sentry and Greeter, as he has on this day for 20 years since I bought him at the then-existent Ben Franklin store (like Woolworth’s).
Where I go, he goes. May he have the pleasure of greeting YOU one day. I have not yet washed his little plastic fanny.
Pilgy says: Happy Thanksgiving to all!
My Thanksgiving column had to be re-written because it didn’t make it into the paper. This starts differently and has minor improvements IMHO. Posted for posterity!
The Holiday Express pulled out of the station in September (Labor Day, Yom Kippur, International Talk Like a Pirate Day, World Beard Day), then chugged through October (Halloween, Samhain, National Name Your Car Day – I’m not making these up), and has now pulled out of the November station (Veterans Day, National Vinegar Day, Thanksgiving).
While some of us have had low-key Thanksgivings in recent years, some enjoyed wild ones. I envy your big-group noise and merrymaking and even the fighting. It makes me wicked nostalgic. A quiet Christmas I don’t mind, but Thanksgiving is supposed to be full of joyful hoots as people walk through the door, with lots of chaos and exploding casseroles.
A friend lamented when his daughter left for college, “Where did 20 years go?” For me it is, at this time of year: where did those beloved people go, those sacred homes, those raucous laughs of holidays past? Those kids all growed up. We all growed up. Sigh. Do you ever wish you were a kid again? Our elders, so many of them now frail or gone, back in charge?
I looked up “nostalgia” and found the craziest assortment of definitions, ranging from “a sad longing” to, for real, “mental illness.” The latter does make sense. Because if you wallow in a sad longing for the past long enough, you are probably 1. Ignoring the bad things about those times, 2. Experiencing mental anguish, and 3. No longer living your life.
An odd detour in an alleged humor column, I realize. Stay with me.
Alas, many best-loved beings have left the building. Favorite musicians, actors, friends, lovers, pets, family, neighbors. The world seems a giant mess. While nostalgia implies a glossing over of history, I feel that my own generation’s past was, in fact, lovelier – before the major disasters (you know the names) that imperiled our overall sense of safety and trust in humans, no matter where we live. At least in the US, by and large, life was easier back then. We just didn’t know it. The oceans, lands, air, and wildlife now at risk. Homeless tent cities common. And there is so much hate now. Or else we see more hate, due to the devil that is 24-hour news on TV and other screens. I say, some nostalgia is legit.
In our messed-up powder keg of a world, it’s difficult to remain hopeful or sane. Especially as it seems there’s little be done about much of it, by us ordinary people anyway, aside from writing checks and voting. It’s distressing.
But I have discovered this: that making an effort to feel good can actually pay off. It’s not easy sometimes, but worth the attempt. I went to see a magical band at Chandler, helped collect gifts for kids, and baked for a dear friend. I went back to choir. Do you know that singing in groups (even small) increases your oxytocin and other good brain chemicals? Head to a tiled bathroom for some doo-wop harmonizing with your housemate(s).
When you feel good, you feel somehow … loved. And conversely, when you feel loved, you feel good. If you’ll allow me to wax Cosmic here: feeling good allows great amounts of what some call the Life Force to flow through you. This makes you healthier physically and emotionally. This makes you better able to navigate illness and difficult situations. Energized. Motivated. Resilient. So feel good if it kills you. Hang out with people that make you feel loved and loving. Okay, maybe for now you’d rather lie around feeling like holy hell. Go right ahead, but don’t do it for long. It’ll make you sick.
Like many of you, I always dug Thanksgiving because my mommy put on such a good one and because it’s non-denominational. We’d host people who had nowhere to go, much as my loud family’s antics were no doubt technically embarrassing. The guests didn’t seem to mind. We all laughed and laughed. I miss every single person in those blurry old Instamatic photos, whether they moved away or died or just grew up. In recent years, I’m the person with nowhere to go for holidays. Someone always invites me in.
In an effort to feel good, and in so doing make others feel good, this Thanksgiving I endeavored to focus more on who’s here than on who’s not. I’m carrying that to each remaining stop on the Holiday Express.
What I suggest this holiday season to you and me both is this: really marinate in communal happiness. No matter how small or random your group, no matter how holidays of years past appear happier in your mind, feel the love right where you are. When at the table, honoring the memory of beings we adored who are now gone, really savor those that are here. Right here. Love the one(s) you’re with. And if you just can’t deal at all this year, get into your berth solo in the Sleeper Car. It’ll be over before you know it.
Feel good. Spread love. Bring leftovers to someone left out. Or invite them in? Good day.
Ann Aikens’ darkly comical, uplifting book of advice, A Young Woman’s Guide to Life: A Cautionary Tale, is available at Amazon & Vermont shops. She has written her Upper Valley Girl column since 1996. Find shops at annaikens.com; sign up for her blog at lower right at uppervalleygirl.com.
Hopefully Dear Reader is enjoying his horn of plenty during this, the season of thanks.
I’m not sure why the horn of plenty amuses the modern brain. Maybe its cutesy “The people of the Land had enough to eat!” artistic rendering looks generally corny. And that old-tymey wording, “horn of plenty.” Whatever the reason, a horn of plenty is a wondrous and comical thing.
For it we give thanks. As a people of many nations, we are thankful together for the bounty of this yearly American feast. And for old movies we will watch afterwards with lines like, “It’s just not right, I tell you!” sputtering from earnest and exasperated men in hats fighting for justice with the charming naïveté of tymes gone by. Who knows if tymes were ever really like that…let us think so and be content. We are thankful for every moment of contentment we can squeeze out of anxiety-provoking modern tymes. Those of us entering the Big Jewelry Years (due to growing knuckles, noses, ears) are grateful for a holiday function whereat we can wear same. And that we’re getting old enough for such parts to grow, which means we are in fact still alive.
There is much about gratitude in print these days. So I conducted an informal poll of the Land. The query, “What are you thankful for?” reaped interesting and heartfelt responses, largely from strangers, including:
Family; my cozy bed; the farmers who grow our food, especially the organics; books; my companion, 
The Schluffer (a cat); snow; the community in my church; that I’m able to walk; people blowing horns; how humans can overlook their differences for the sake of community; my family both at school and at home; the parents’ wallet; I have a hot husband; gluten; the opportunity to immigrate to the United States and my happy life here; that my son has a dog; girl scouts; my beautiful wife; “to eat”; my family; the pleasure of making the letters J and F in cursive, which may become obsolete; that spiritually bankrupt people have consumerism to fill the void; sarcasm; young faces eager to learn; my beautiful daughters and that I have a job; my health; my ear muffs; music. The front runners? Family and community.
My family and community includes the crazed nutters I call friends, including the illustrious and sharp-dressing Viscomte de Villainy, who have stuck by me through thick and very, verrry thin. I am thankful for them, and for how people’s faces change when they smile. And for my blood family, who are definitely nuts. And for a special chipmunk at Silver Lake this summer, an alert little feller named Scamp who roamed the grounds freely with a cheerful, magical insouciance in broad daylight– no shady rock walls for him! We are not thankful for the raptor that likely picked Scamp off, loveable easy target that he was.
With the holidays approaching, I am among those thankful for the opp to spend money. It’s always scrimping and saving in modern tymes, isn’t it? Wondering if the income will stop, what new disaster will cripple us monetarily. Gift giving becomes an even more guilty boggler when in magazines and TV and radio, it’s all, “Have less stuff. Get rid of your stuff. Stop having stuff. No stuff!” I for one like to wrap stuff. And give it. As a present. My solution? Gift people with experiences (tickets to a show, a subscription to something) and other stuff that can be used up. I’ll stop or Dear Reader might guess his gift. Can’t have that.
I add in closing sincere thanks that humans can’t think of everything all the time, try as we might. So some bad things get little air time. Like that tiff at work or the altercation at the dump. When we think on it, it’s galling (Treated unfairly? Flubbed a reply? Acted rudely?), but eventually, well, other thots encroach. Thank you, Lord. Because we do not need to dwell on dumb garbage.
We prefer pleasant thots. Thots about…cornucopias. Or: Maybe I won’t dress so shabby for the big meal this year. Make an effort. Do something new. A new charitable effort. Giant earrings. Angel food cake instead of pie. Something.
Wherever you are, blow your horn – with a charming naïveté, a magical insouciance…however you want to play it. Blow a few notes my way. I’ll be listening for you. Good birdin’ and good day.
After a fresh dumping by Mother Nature, your ski weekend awaits. Or just drive up for a post-T-day recovery weekend at an inn and sleep — or snowshoe off your holiday blubber — in our winter wonderland. Vacation states are for doing what you want. And nothing you don’t want.
Behold the craftsmanship that went, letter by letter, into the spreading of this important message. Truer words were never, um, self-adhesived onto a bumper.
While each Ford has its own mystique, it’s not every Ford that serves as a reminder to dig out your cheery Floyd and Death Rattle CDs for family gatherings during this, the season of thanks. Oh and by the way, Peace to you, fellow motorists!
My Buddy
This time of year, when I’m not buying battalion-sized Christmas wrap at BJ’s Club, shaving years off my birth date when paying for the fine wines of Rite-Aid, or standing on a snow-peaked mountain drinking a green wellness nectar in a thermal yoga costume, I’m girding myself for the family brawl at Thanksgiving. I have an idea what might fire it up this year.
Yes, it was a tight race, folks and no one knew just how it was gonna unfold. What boggled was the speed of it. Everyone went, “That was it?” Imagine, Florida not slowing us down for once, like the granny in a Cadillac Fleetwood that she is, who for unknown reasons, despite 20 cylinders and a giant grille on her land yacht, just can’t manage to keep up with the others. Whodathunk?! I can’t touch the lambasting of Flo on NPR’s Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, so podcast the 11/11 show for that thorough hosing. But some of my best friends are Republican, or Floridian, so I move quickly on.
I have a (proven!) theory that it’s not what you are prepared to endure that will go wrong. It’s something out of the blue that will blindside you and ruin everything. The holiday family brawl is a thing we’re prepared to endure that actually probably will go wrong. On the rare occasion that it doesn’t—no heated argument or fisticuffs about politics, nuclear power, or a family member’s bad behavior—a kind of uncertain, almost disappointed apprehension hangs in the air. Like when sparks spew out of a volcano but no lava follows. Just a collective and baffled, “That was it?!”
I’ve never seen so many rodents in my life, have you? What with them so abundant due to soft winters and fewer predators, it’s like Willard out there. Good menu items for T-day could be roast squirrel for the entrée (they can stuff a quail, can’t they?) with spicy battered mice poppers for the first course or as a passed app. Both cheap, plentiful, and eminently deep-fryable. People who deep fry turkeys and eat rodents are unafraid to make a statement—even if that statement is “We crazy!”—in a way that I for one have come to admire. Don’t fret, the baby mice caught in my Havahart® trap are too cute to eat. I asked my sister-in-law why babies are so cute. Her texted answer: “Survival.” The alternative amuses as it horrifies: “I’ve had it with this ugly little thing; let’s drop it off on the loading dock at Costco.”
Which reminds me: ado is being duly made about Black Friday having moved up via fake holiday creep to Thursday night, thereby ruining big box employees’ holidays. I’ll tell you what the Aikens family will be doing Thanksgiving night: watching Planes, Trains and Automobiles for the eleven hundredth time, followed by movies on TCM with charming olde-tymey dialogue (“It’s no good, I tell ya. It’s just no good!”) A spanking for retailers’ management, I say. A spanking! And not the good kind.
Now for some Turkey Day Sniglets®, some old some new.
Bloatilla – The fleet of bloated corpses littering the living room post-meal
Candensation – Glistening moisture layer that forms on canberry sauce
Exconversation – Labored dinner conversation with your sister’s creepy new “boyfriend”
Goo-goo Goggles – What your son must be wearing to see any merit in his new “girlfriend”
Coochie Cool – The appeal of your niece’s cute new squeeze
Loonesta – The boring postulate posed by a crazy relative so late in the meal it puts you to sleep
Yankee Panky – What the Pilgrims did after the feast to increase their number.
Which reminds me: I have a somewhat macabre and expressionless decorative light-up pilgrim I bought years ago at, you guess it, Rite-Aid. Should have bought the entire family but I just got the man. He’s gotten dirty and I had a good laugh washing his little plastic fanny a few days ago. I also enjoyed strapping him into the passenger seat for the ride to New York, not unlike people who have scammed their way into the carpool lane with a plastic “passenger”. I grew fond of my inanimate co-pilot. Fellow motorists dug him.
Which reminds me: years ago, my waiter friends shared an apartment on the lower east side of Manhattan which, though probably quite tony now, was a dangerous hellhole back then. As a “security measure,” they placed My Buddy in the window to make it look like someone was home. My Buddy was a large male doll marketed to boys. That my friends, one of whom died tragically not long afterwards, actually believed an unmoving rendering of a boy positioned in a window would deter burglars (read: desperate junkies looking to fix), and that it was called My Buddy, is as silly—yet dear—as the childish signature on your original Social Security card.
Well, whodathunk? In the end, this column is to me what Thanksgiving is mostly about. Plastic fannies, cheap wine, doomed attempts at innovative menu items, and remembering people now gone, possibly with inanimate friends, that were once unspeakably beloved. And funny. And twisted. Who shall forever remain unforgotten. At least while we’re around. Good eatin’ and good day.
One thing exhausting us can be undone: the overuse of tiresome modern expressions. Rather than risk coining another irksome term, I’ll call them isms—expressions beaten to death by people unwilling or unable to come up with less hackneyed terms. You can fill in your own prefix. Trite-isms. Annoying-isms. Tool-isms. Have at it.
There are two ismal varieties: conversational and corporate. No way you’ve escaped the conversational ones. Some were funny to begin with and lost their luster, others never funny: Don’t go there (initially sassy, then grating); too much information (with dumb caboose, “TMI!”); been there, done that (listener thinks with fake smile, “I’m supposed laugh at this…again?”) A person or animal of desirable qualities referred to as a keeper is another groaner.
My peeves: It is what it is. You do the math. Reach out. Shout out. I hear ya, girlfriend. Pick his brain. Face time. Me time. Meh. Panties in a bunch [wad]. Hilarious misapplications of What happens in [wherever] stays in [wherever]. No one tells you anything anymore, they share it. Ick.
Aha! moment: The Aha! Effect, coined by psychologists in 1979, mutated into a “moment”— based less on cognition than on personal growth—on Oprah. I love Oprah but it reeks of yourselfness when you use your own ism a lot. (There I go again: Ism!) Or was it Dr. Phil’s? Same thing.
I requested isms from friends. Their vitriol, largely unprintable, was the usual high comedy. Some hate yada yada yada and blah blah blah; others not so much. One loathes “young people saying back in the day. You’re 25, back in what day?” A polite friend detests whatever, and “no problem as a response to ‘thank you.’” An old friend dislikes partner; also epic, as in an epic failure, fight, or concert experience. Uh-oh “concert experience” could be one. You have to watch yourself. It’s Ism Bewareness Month.
The more noxious variety is the corporate ism. In meetings, an Orwellian Newspeak quality makes the ism-adverse colleague wonder, “Does he really think I’m falling for this?” Like when obstacles and problems suddenly became challenges. Sometimes I’ll say “problem” in a meeting just to see if anyone bites. That can be fun. Not fun is how now we’re supposed to be embracing things (like diversity and transparency) while still pushing the envelope and thinking outside the box, then using our skill sets to facilitate it all. Much of this idiocy started in corporate management books, and spread like Fluff® over the white bread of our lives. By white bread I mean meetings, pop-up ads, and e-mail forwards by contagiously dull-witted people. It’s causing the doltification of America. We’re like monkeys with a 37-phrase vocabulary and hand signals.
My list of banalities is topped by the stale robust (as in “robust platform”) and leverage (as in “leveraging our robust platform”), followed closely by on the same page, ROI, win-win, and pushback.
My rankled friends despise: knowledge transfer, synergy, buy-in, talking points, getting energized around [a subject] , the New Normal, at the end of the day, cohort, walk me through the document, coming late to the party, drill down, carrying the water, sound bite, we have a good story to tell, kicking the can down the road, invite as a noun, and “impact as a verb…in the name of trying to make what we’re doing sound more important than it is.”
Yes, corporate isms are worse because they are (1) designed to increase productivity by minimizing time spent on original thought and (2) mingled with jargony buzzwords in a sad attempt to (a) elevate one’s dim or under-researched presentation to a higher level of importance or (b) to disguise meaningless blather as something of actual value. That is, to impress—when there’s no there there or, at the least, precious little. Apologies to Gertrude Stein.
E-mail and texting have their own shopworn abbreviations. I can’t stand LOL but dig her longer cousins. I add my own initials on with no explanation—say, “ADASD” for “and dying a slow death”—and let the recipient figure it out. Try it, you’ll like it (<–still funny).
IMHO It’s all TMI, friends. We’re LOLAPOBO [and puking our brains out]. If isms taint the family argument at your Thanksgiving dinner table, why not wait for a lull, say, “You know, Cuz, the great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink’ – George Orwell, Politics and the English Language, 1946”…and see what happens?
Good eatin’, good conversin’, and good day.
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