`It's Mainly Because of Thanksgiving'

On Thanksgiving Day, while my wife took the kids to see a movie, I drove 40 minutes on empty freeways to retrieve Christmas ornaments and lights from the storage unit. Earlier in the week we had hung a wreath of fresh conifer boughs on the front door, so each arrival and departure brings with it the scent of a lumber mill. Because of the holiday, about which a religious aura still lingers, I was in the mood for sacred music and put on Lester Young’s “Kansas City” Sessions. By the time I heard Young’s clarinet solo on “Pagin’ the Devil,” I was feeling almost sanctified.

The prison-like storage facility was deserted. Even the caretaker, a loud peroxide blonde who lives on the premises and drives a red Corvette, was absent. Our unit resembles a garage on a corridor of identical garages, in a gray Soviet-style building of concrete blocks. I spent an hour digging through boxes. I found the outdoor Christmas lights but not the small ones for the tree. I found a Little Rascals DVD, the Library of America paperback of Moby-Dick, the board game Othello, two stuffed animals my 8-year-old wanted, two extension cords, and dumbbells and a medicine ball for my wife. We’ve lived comfortably without this stuff for more than six months but I packed it all in the car.

The drive back was faster (I didn’t get lost) and I looked forward to having the house to myself for an hour or so and cleaning the green beans. My wife had already stuffed the turkey and put it in the oven – another good smell in a warm house on a cold day. I wanted to read a poem I had remembered while digging through the boxes – “The Transparent Man” by the late Anthony Hecht. Please read the whole thing, one of Hecht’s dramatic monologues, spoken by a woman with leukemia, but these lines are the reason the poem had come back to me:

“It's mainly because of Thanksgiving. All these mothers
And wives and husbands gaze at me soulfully
And feel they should break up their box of chocolates
For a donation, or hand me a chunk of fruitcake.
What they don't understand and never guess
Is that it's better for me without a family;
It's a great blessing. Though I mean no harm.”

Read out of context, the following line sounds like a Zen bumper sticker. In context, it can make you weep:

“I care about fewer things; I'm more selective.”