At the Table

From Bill Caldwell’s 1983 “The Day After:”

Please pass the bicarb. That second round of pie a la mode was a mistake. Indeed the entire notion of acknowledging nature’s kindness by feasting may have been a mistake. The Pilgrims should have celebrated by fasting. Something is missing from this eyewitness account of the first harvest festival:

“Our harvest being gotten in, our Governour sent foure men on fowling, so that we might after a more special manner rejoyce together after we had gathered the fruit of our labours. They foure in one day killed as much fowl as, with little help beside, served the Company almost a week.”

The “little help beside” would have been fish, berries, corn bread, pumpkins, root vegetables. In your imagination you can furnish the picnic tables at Plimouth in the autumn of 1621, with Massasoit and the Indians huddled at the far end of the board, quite unaware they were about to pay for their hospitality by being evicted from their countryside, and with the resident clergyman whooping at the other end, bathed in a strong north light for the benefit of subsequent painters. In your imagination it’s all there. In fact something is missing. It is the very idea of thanks.

It may have seemed to the taciturn Pilgrims that the idea of gratitude was implicit in the very idea of a bash, but apparently the cosmos was not pleased to be taken for granted. The Pilgrims’ next year was a disaster. Immedicable sickness came, and death and a drought that blasted the fields and gardens, and at last they prayed for rain and got enough to warrant the labor of the harvesting, and this time the governor appointed a day for “public thanksgiving.” Still something was missing. It was the groaning board. Not until 1636 did our neighbors in Scituate gather “in the meetinghouse beginning some halfe an hour before nine and continued until after twelve o’clock,” with psalm-singing, prayer and sermon plus “making merry to the creatures, the poorer being invited of the richer.” At last they had gotten their act together. The line is inscrutable: shall we construe it to mean the Indians had been demoted from their status as guide and philosopher to the status of creature? No matter; by 1777 the Congress had commanded that Dec. 18 be set aside as a day of thanksgiving for the defeat of Gen. Burgoyne; by 1863 President Lincoln proclaimed the last Thursday in November a day of national thanksgiving “for the defense against unfriendly designs from without and signal victories over the enemy who is of our own household.”

I have lingered over these matters of fact because I’m interested in this business of making such a fuss on one day of the 365 over doing that which we should do on getting up every morning. There are times when I wonder whether it isn’t rather canny of us to enumerate our blessings and notify heaven that its latest favors have been received and contents noted. Thanks for the turkey; thanks for central heating and antibiotics and hard sauce and mashed potatoes, and we look forward to a continuance of our cordial relations in the years ahead and have a mint?

Even when professionally thoughtful people try to say what there is to be thankful about, they don’t always avoid sounding a little smug about the pleasures of acquisition. See George Ernest Wright, Parkman professor of divinity at the Harvard Divinity School:

“The harvest festival has thus become more than an affair of the seasons; it celebrates a mighty act of God in history, wherein nature’s abundance was used by the Lord of all life in his creating a new thing: the American nation.” Out of adversity had emerged the confection which is nobody but us. It does seem vain.

I hope no one will construe any of this as putting down the observance of Thanksgiving or lower-case thanksgiving. To be conscious of our blessings and to express in any form our awarenesss of them and our wonder and awe that they have been granted to us undeserved is about as human a thing as we can do.

It’s just that I feel uneasy about ritualizing thanks.

I’ve wondered whether any of us say thanks for the most improbable blessing imaginable — the miracle of being. We’ll all of us not-be someday soon — any life is a spark between two black eternities — but by no grunting exertion of the mind can we imagine, nothing, nothing, nothing at all. I try to nag myself to notice and to be grateful for things that don’t belong to me — grass and its reminder that of just such junk as stars are made of emerged this chemical phenomenon called life; clear, sweet water, the birds that come to my windowsill and ask what’s all this jazz about feasting; for the glint of lights in windows across the bay and the sound of bells in distant towns; for the glow of sleeping cities beyond the black rim of the horizon . . . .

Thanks for being. My being and yours.

Please pass the bicarb.

Compiled by Cynthia Meisner

library@mvgazette.com