mallorys_camera | Why I Hate Thanksgiving (Reply)

Robin and Ben drove up the coast last night to see George R. R. Martin. Oh, to have been a fly on the wall of that bookstore.

Robin, who blasted through A Feast of Crows in something like two days, had come fully armed with a long list of questions ("Does Nimbus save Bloodwyn on the road from Flapdoodle to Borborygmy?") He was the only kid in a small room crammed with 200 fans, most of whom had not finished the book, and so got to hold court: "Well, personally I think –" Picture it: one 80 pound boy against 200 tons of rabid science fiction fandom. Martin inscribed his book personally so maybe we can auction it off in seven years to defray the cost of Robin's college education. Unless his acting career takes off.

This week has been kind of a wash. I'm feeling unanchored and invisible; I suspect it has a lot to do with the upcoming holiday season. We're going to Deep Springs for Thanksgiving and I'm sick with anxiety. Suspect the anxiety is prophylactic – if I don't visualize every disaster that could possibly happen in full 3-D technicolor, then the disasters are more likely to befall, right? The car will break down over Tioga Pass; the dog sitter will poison Milo and steal all my jewelry; the store will explode.

November has been a slow month sales-wise at the store. People just don't do their Christmas shopping on Cannery Row. I'm doing the Google ad thing in a targeted area and web orders are starting slowly to trickle in but we're still down 15% from last month, careening down that retail slide into the dead-dead-dead months of winter. Of course, we will do boffo sales the evening of the big Xmas Tree lighting and the weekend following so probably the store will catch up but it's a bird in the bush at this point.

Can I just say right now how much I hate Thanksgiving? Suspect this has to do with having such a dysfunctional birth family since gratitude in the abstract is appealing to me. I am grateful. I'm grateful for having two terrific kids, I'm grateful for having a man who's the other voice in my inner dialog, I'm grateful for the way the blue sky reflects off the edge of the ocean – a parallel universe in the wet sand – I'm grateful that the world makes me laugh so much.

But gratitude is such a bogus spiritual index. Because really what you're thinking when you say, "I'm grateful" is, "Thank God I'm not as fucked up as [insert proper pronoun or name of suffering demographic.]" Because with gratitude, there's always an A list and a B list. By virtue of being a 21st century woman born in America with access to contraception, free speech and free enterprise, I'm on the evolutionary A list. (Although if you want to subdivide it further, I'm sitting in the very back rows of the reserved aisles being as I'm middle-aged and up to my waist in debt.) I think of all those women in Africa, Central America, Asia, whose life force is every bit as intense as my own and I think, "Damn! I'm lucky that the DNA floating around in the balls and ovaries of those third generation progenitors chanted 'Get out now! Get out now!'" I'm lucky I'm not them.

Is that the same thing as being grateful?

After her husband died, for many years, my great-grandmother, Anna Nachman, lived at the Hotel Grenada. This was Brooklyn, in the 1950's. Anna Nachman was a rich widow – my great-grandfather Abe had invented some chemical process that made dynamite explode better. Blood money, right? Maybe that's why the clan was like a sit com version of The Fall of the House of Usher. Grandma Nachman was a hideous old woman to my child's memory, all warts and bad smells and dewlaps. Her only daughter Henrietta was my mother's mother. Shortly before the time of which I write, my aunt Annie, then ten years old, came home from school one day to discover that half the furniture in the house was gone. Also her mother.

This was good news and bad news.

Henrietta was an undiagnosed borderline personality whose Joan Crawford-like parenting methods had already produced permanent psychic crippling in her two oldest daughters, Jane and my unfortunate mother, Lynn. Her absence meant that Annie never had to worry about being awakened at two in the morning to be beaten bloody with a hanger for forgetting to wash a dish.
On the other hand, being deserted by your own mother is not an easy thing to wrap your head around. Not at ten years old.

Anyway, every year, Grandma Nachman celebrated Thanksgiving with a huge buffet at the Grenada Hotel and maybe that's where my hatred of the holiday started. It was a very grim affair. It was all about angling for the remains of the dynamite fortune: the disgraced Vogel clan who really didn't deserve to be there since their only reason for being there – Henrietta – had decamped and was now playing honky-tonk piano in some gigolo bar in Miami Beach versus Henrietta's sister Gertie who had not married well, but none of whose children and grandchildren had disgraced her by getting knocked up by a Sicilian sailor – hi, Dad! – who was not even circumcised.

Hey! one more thing to add to my list: I'm grateful not to be spending Thanksgiving at the Hotel Grenada. Though what a great horror story that would make.