Thanksgiving 2011

I was going to follow up my last post about the meaning of Thanksgiving with a brief, touchingly poignant review of the day itself.

Mike beat me to it.

I was asked last night how I thought the day went. And I couldn't quite articulate it then, but here's what I am feeling today. It truly was blessed and memorable. My body is exhausted and my spirit exhilarated. Yesterday began with breakfast with a few dear neighbors. One of our topics of conversation was about love languages. Mine is giving—it makes me so happy to do for others. To create space for friends and strangers alike to rest, connect, laugh, eat, drink and enjoy. And yesterday, as guests trickled in and the house filled with merriment, I felt truly overwhelmed with joy at how rich life is. So many new friends have joined our tribe in recent months, and watching everyone interact with one another and I kept thinking over and over that "no one has a family quite as wonderful as mine." My cup truly overflows with friends, encouragement, comedy, and grace. 

I got the Thanksgiving I wanted. It felt comfortable and familial. Maybe even a little better than actual family, because we've looked each other in the eye and said "I choose you. Good or bad, we are in this together." We stick. And it's beautiful.

Hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving filled with as much warmth and laughter as we did. Also, go see the Muppet movie if you haven't already. It'll remind you that there's still wonder in the world.

The Meaning of Thanksgiving

This Thursday, my dear roommate and I will welcome 22 24 of our nearest and dearest to our home for Thanksgiving. It makes my heart incredibly happy to have the apartment filled with laughter and merriment all day long.

I've already written a little about my mom, who is a spectacular woman. She was raised–by American parents, from Wichita, Kansas–in Punta Arenas, Chile. That's her as a child, below, with two teeny kittehs she found. Hard to tell who's more adorbs.

At any rate, my mom. She speaks both English and Spanish fluently, is an incredible cook and always had dinner on the table after putting in a full day at the office (she and my dad are both academics and have worked at universities my whole life.) And she loves flavor. Deep spicy, rich dishes that set your tongue, and very often your soul, on fire. I assume it comes from growing up where she did, though I can say that having grown up on the border of Mexico, where they live probably has a lot to do with it, too.

So what does this have to do with Thanksgiving? Well, in a nutshell, here it is: I've never had a traditional American thanksgiving meal that I haven't made with my own two hands. As I said, my mom is an incredible cook. But she doesn't exactly do things by the Midwestern Housewives Handbook. We never had a pumpkin pie, or green bean casserole or those sweet potatoes with marshmallows on top. Not once. Our holiday dinner often consisted of things like tamales, enchiladas, poblano-spiced potatoes, game hens, venison, quail—you know, staples of South Texas cuisine. It was pretty much a regular dinner, and afterward we'd all go do regular things, sequestering ourselves on opposite ends of the house.

My whole life, I longed for the holidays that I saw on TV (of course, part of that was also longing for snow in 90-degree heat.) I wanted a packed house full of friends, family and foibles. I wanted cocktails and and tons of baked goods and some kind of crazy mishap with the turkey and for nobody to really care because they always realized that in the end they had plenty of pie—and each other.

So, my first year in New York, I was pleased to have made enough friends to host a Thanksgiving meal at my friend Jeremy's place in Ditmas Park. We invited about 15 people and I insisted on cooking the entire meal. From scratch. Which means that I basically spent 2 days straight in the kitchen making things I'd never made (and in some cases, never eaten) and was a tired mess by the time people arrived. I fell asleep after the meal and everyone else went downstairs to the bar. Not my finest hostessing hour.

Needless to say, I learned a lot in the ensuing years. Not very quickly (I'm stubborn that way) and I've continued to try and pull of some large and elaborate recipes just because I wanted to, and as a result have been often too tired to really enjoy the day itself. Somewhere along the way I missed the whole reason that Thanksgiving is so enticing. It's not about the meal. It's a day to simply enjoy all we've been given, and the greatest gift we have is the people we love, and who love us back despite our crazy (and this year, I'm more grateful than ever for my friends who put up with my ridiculousness on the regular.)

I delight in a good party, a well-set table, great food. But more than that, I delight in people.

This year's meal is potluck. I've limited myself to making only the things that I enjoy making and can pull of with ease. We'll all pile in downstairs on the couches to watch football and tell stories and laugh until we cry. Because that's all I've ever really wanted on Thanksgiving day. The feeling of being a family.

My Top 10 Books of 2011*

*One caveat before we begin: not all of these books were published in 2011, this is simply the year that I read them in. And it's my list, so I can do what I want.

The best way to be (or become) a good writer is to read. A lot. Like all the time. Yes, you also have to put words on paper (important part of the process of writing, that.) Sometimes, however, we have to step away from our own narrative and step into someone else's world.

These top ten books contain the pages I went to this year to be inspired, moved, affirmed, overwhelmed, conflicted and intimidated. It's not an exhaustive list of what I read...it's just a list of what stuck.

Would love to hear what you read this year and why you loved it—drop a note in the comments. I'm also taking reading suggestions for 2012.

A Visit From the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan: Like listening to a great song: rich, complex, harmonious, knee-weakening prose that keeps you moving forward.

Go the Fuck to Sleep, Adam Mansbach: Pretty sure this was the most gifted book to new parents this year. Anyone who's had to put a child to bed can relate. Bonus: Samuel Jackson reading the book aloud.

Other People We Married, Emma Straub: A fantastic first collection of short stories by the cheerful lass who also works at my neighborhood book shop, Book Court. I have yet to work up the courage to tell her how much I love her work. Guess that's a new year's resolution in the making.

Rumors of God, Jon Tyson and Darren Whitehead: These books aren't in any order, by the way, except that I didn't want to put a book by a man I deeply admire right under the word Fuck. It seemed wrong.
Rumors will challenge you to seriously consider where you see God moving in the world, in the church and in your life. A fresh and refreshing look at how the Gospel shapes culture.

The Imperfectionists, Tom Rachman: A novel that reads like a collection of interwoven short stories, Rachman's debut novel is not just the story of a struggling foreign paper, but a unique spin on the demise of print in the age of digital publishing. Bonus: the cover art is spectacular.

Blue Nights, Joan Didion: I barely made it through Didion's first memoir of loss, The Year of Magical Thinking. Her second (regarding the death of her daughter) is absolutely heart-wrenchingly, unflinchingly honest, frail, and human.

Literary Brooklyn: The Writers of Brooklyn and the Story of American City Life, Evan Hughes: A journey through the borough of Kings, from Walt Whitman to the Jonathans (Lethem, Ames, Safran-Foer.) The story of a storied (see what I did there?) city.

I Knew You'd Be Lovely, Alethea Black: The kind of short story collection where you can only read one story at a time, slowly, and then close the book and reflect for days on what you just got smacked with. Bonus: The book contains "stories behind the stories," giving a rare window into the facts that inform the craft.

Hearing God, Dallas Willard: For anyone who thinks God doesn't speak, doesn't think they've heard God speak, or has gotten lost in their conversation with God. Digestible, yet powerful read that's changed the way I listen and pray.

Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns), Mindy Kaling: I've got a huge girl crush on this funny lady. When a 27-page excerpt of the book was available online earlier this year, I dropped everything (including the baby I was holding) to read it. Just kidding about the baby part. Kaling has the ability to make the normal something sublimely funny. Savoring it.

Delight in simple things.

Things I love: genuine laughter amongst friends, clean cool sheets, a perfect cup of coffee, driving through the TX hill country, silence and stillness, the sunlight filtered through the grand windows of the NY Public Library.

The motto of the boarding school I attended: Teach us delight in simple things. It's a line from a Rudyard Kipling poem and has been seared into my heart and brain for over half my life now.

Delighting hasn't always come easy. Neither has appreciating simplicity. I've often taken for granted what's right in front of me, choosing instead to rush through life without stopping to enjoy what's happening in the present moment. What's always struck me about the line above is the word "teach."

Children are incredibly teachable. Their young minds are like sponges, hungry for every morsel of information they can absorb. Through taste, touch, sight, sound and smell kids learn about the world and their place in it. Every day is full with the possibility of enjoyment and excitement and newness.

As we grow up, routines encroach on that enthusiasm. Even if we still enjoy learning, we aren't as free to explore. Our educational system doesn't leave a lot of room for experimentation. Order reigns. We get into set rhythms of waking, working, living and sleeping. We have to be taught (re-taught?) to live in the present moment, and delight in the simplicity of life. We have to learn how to have fun and enjoy where we are rather than be hyper-focused on where we are going.

This year has felt like a return to simple things for me and for many I know. Staying in rather than going out. Cooking, instead of ordering. Making things instead of buying them. Reusing and trading, rather than just tossing. It feels good and right to be excited about the little things (like those pictured above.)

What simple things do you delight in? Are you taking the time to enjoy them, really and truly?

Work In Progress

When I was unemployed and living in Ditmas Park, there was a coffee shop called Vox Pop on Cortelyou Road that became my home-away-from home, where I could sit and job search, commiserate with other neighborhood creatives and write uninterrupted for long stretches of time.

That winter was hard. I remember feeling as if it would never lift—not just the weather, but the mood. No job. No relationship. No home that I could really settle into. And yet, without the distraction of those things, the tiniest bits of life were suddenly noticeable to me. There's a line scribbled in a journal from that time,  "snowflakes fall, one by one, as if they know just where they are going to rest." Closing my eyes, I can remember exactly what the coffee shop looked and felt like on that day. Based on that, a work-in-progress for Wednesday. Feedback most welcome.

01.19.09

Warm soft light and a tree of white feathers
Under a thousand paper cranes I sit
As snow swirls like glitter shaken in a globe
The breath catches in my throat as I am
Captivated by the beauty of it all
The hush of a faraway guitar
The sad smiling eyes of JFK gazing down over the bar
I have seen the past and it is the future
I am in the moment and already it is gone

Beauty is terror, Plato said
I feel full with the fear of having seen it all
of never seeing anything so beautiful again
This must be what it’s like to live underwater
to exist in the deep midnight swirl where a pinpoint of light registers
but is too far away to reach
This is what we call hope—
a bubble on the surface
A snowflake coming to rest on the edge of a bench
it is in the tiniest bits of nature that grace is made evident
in the unimportant moments that the magnitude of life is revealed