11-28-13 RMB Happy Birthday
Dear Rita Mae Brown,
Happy Birthday and Happy Thanksgiving
to you RMB! I enjoyed the day despite it being a holiday. It was treated like a
day off, a real day off, free and clear of any chores. Unlike previous
Thanksgivings in which I enjoyed the company of family and friends at the
dinner table, today I am relaxing at home. There was no long drive and no
dressing up, not that I dress up much anyway.
I spent my day walking, writing and
then did more walking. It was perfect. My sister-roommate and I purchased
fixings for a Thanksgiving dinner that will be held with a friend
tomorrow. I like the way people closest to me are more concerned about
celebrating our time together, than the date or the title given to a day on the
calendar.
Perhaps my aversion to holidays is
seated in an issue with authority or societal directives. I decide when and how
I will celebrate. I decide a lot of things for myself that aren’t necessarily
condoned by society. That statement alone, made by another person, would be enough
to make me wary. I almost deleted it, but I realized that every individual I
know is the same way. We all decide which leg goes in our pants first at the
start of each day, if in fact one actually wears pants.
So I will leave it in and offer an
example, I prefer loads of sweetener and crème in my coffee. Most I know don’t.
The decisions I make regarding my life are not terribly drastic, at least they
don’t seem like it to me. The intent of this blog is to illustrate our
differences and build bridges of understanding. I’d better stop, as I am on the
verge of rambling about the many sides of understanding and if that is condoning
or supporting and wondering what if another person lived in a place that flew
in the face of all I consider to be good, as I probably do in relation to some.
Would I be understanding?
Near the end of the day, I received a
text. After being stuck on the freeway for two and half hours, my trio of
nephews and their moms have aborted their mission to travel one hour north to
spend the holiday with family in Oceanside. They are headed home, without
having had dinner. Although, several families conversed through open windows of
parked cars in freeway lanes about having enough food among them to make a
Thanksgiving meal right there. “What did you bring for dinner?” they asked each
other.
The boys planned to spend the night
anyway, so I invited them all in and the dinner we had purchased for tomorrow, along
with their contribution to the aborted meal, becomes a Thanksgiving dinner for
three nephews, two moms, one sister and myself. Cheers for having a sister able
to throw together a meal in twenty minutes!
It was an impromptu dinner, eaten in
the living room as we gathered around the TV and watched a show we all liked.
Not traditional. Well maybe a little bit, in that we were with “family” and we
gave thanks for one another and to the powers that be for bringing us together.
And the reason for the traffic delay, in
addition to the holiday rush, there was a bomb scare. Fortunately, it turned
out to be a hoax, or rather a giant misunderstanding as someone learned a lesson
about crossing certain lines in practical jokes.
For a more personal account of the
freeway experience, complete with photos, you can read Maria’s post on her blog
at http://mariasmeanderingmind.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-thanksgiving-that-almost-wasnt.html
Happy Thanksgiving one and all,
Loraine
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