Giving Thanks

I'll spare y'all the rant in which I deconstruct Thanksgiving as a celebration of typically American greed and entitlement. That's not the real reason I hate Thanksgiving anyway.

The reason I hate Thanksgiving is that while I was growing up, my mother was singularly prone to deep depressions around the holidays. She frequently spent Thanksgiving in bed crying, which meant I spent the day taking long walks through a mostly deserted Central Park, wondering what it was like to have a family.

But this Thanksgiving was fun. We cooked a turkey so we could have turkey sandwiches. On Wednesday we drove up to Santa Cruz to hang with Annie and Stew and eat their turkey. (My piecrusts turned out fine.) On Thursday Adam and Kat drove down from San Francisco and we took them to a restaurant for Thanksgiving buffet dinner. Overpriced and the food was bland, but hey! I didn't feel like cooking. Afterwards we went for a l-o-n-g walk by the ocean. The sun was setting. It was cold and clear. The colors were the most incredible gradient of pale violet into blue into gold, and I felt ecstatic to be alive.



Friday was the predictable mad house but boy, we made a lot of money. Only one minor annoyance – some asshole and his twitch girlfriend broke a bottle of hot sauce.

"Do we have to pay for this?" she squeaked.

"Well, I can't make you pay for it obviously," I said. "But if you had any class, of course you'd pay for it."

With that they were out the door.

"You should have made it simple for them," said Ben. "You should have said yes."

"They weren't going to pay for it no matter what I said to them," I said. "I saw the look on her face. This way at least I planted a seed of deep self-loathing."

But maybe not.