Somewhere along the way, a tradition started in my family with my father and me. Each Thanksgiving our nuclear family of two parents and two children would drive up to Covington, Tennessee where the two old-maid sisters of my grandfather on my father’s side lived on the farm where they had grown up. As far as I knew, they had only left the farm for a long trip one time. We would meet other relatives there, most of them women because the many of the men in the family had died over the years.
The two old-maid sisters were true country-folk. I still remember an argument they got into once when we came up to visit during one summer weekend. They had killed a snake in the garden earlier in the week, and they couldn’t remember whether they needed to hang the snake back-up or belly-up over the fence to make it rain. One sister said belly-up and the other said back-up. It’s not like we could look it up on the Internet since it would exist for more than a decade, and the Old Farmer’s Almanacs they had around didn’t seem to contain that particular helpful tidbit of information.
The house the sisters, my great-aunts, lived in had been built by their father, my Dad’s grandfather. There were several barns, chicken coops, and other outbuildings behind the main house, which had that odd canting design of a structure that had been added onto more than once before the days of building codes. Except for the chicken coops, the other working buildings had fallen into disrepair, in the case of the main barn the “fallen” was literal. One of the structures had once been a stable, and on the side of it was where the carriage had been kept. The roof had collapsed onto the carriage, but it still fascinated me when I was of an age where I didn’t think there was a time before me. I once posted a photo of my father with his grandfather, my Dad sitting in that horse-drawn carriage and his grandfather standing next to it. That photo was taken at the farm about 55 years ago, and they were still using a horse-drawn carriage.
The land had not been completely cleared for farming, there was still a substantial set of woods that a child could play in, or a man could go hunting. Somewhere along the way, going hunting for squirrels became a tradition that we did on Thanksgiving day before we had our enormous country-style meal in the early afternoon. Somehow I suspect it was a way for my father to get away from all the women and their “cackling like a bunch of chickens” (his words at the time… this was long ago and in the country, remember?).
We would bundle up if the weather was cold, Dad would load up his shotgun, and we would walk across the cotton fields that were black and brown and white with the damp bare earth and the dry, dead cotton plants each with the two or three cotton bolls that the picker had not extracted during the harvest. The white bolls made a stark contrast to the dull dark colors surrounding them and made the mist of our breath in the chill air look gray by comparison. We would enter the woods, easily stepping over the two slow moving, shallow, narrow streams that bounded the stand of old trees.
Usually we saw nothing but falling leaves, and the only shots fired were target practice. One year we actually saw a squirrel, and my father shot it. After it had tumbled down to the ground, we picked it up and carried the trophy back to the farmhouse. We were instructed to “dress” the squirrel before we came in and cleaned up for dinner, so we dutifully went back into the barnyard surrounded by the dilapidated, collapsing structures, and began to skin the dead animal. I had never done that before, and while following my father’s instructions to pull on the skin from one side while he pulled from the other, I kept jumping back to keep my fancy, white leather tennis shoes from getting the blood on them.
Was I scarred for life?
Nope. Despite not growing up on the farm, my relatives were all farmers, and I had absorbed a lot of their worldview. Their perspective on life and death is considerably different than those who didn’t feed their chickens the morning before they ate one of them in the evening.
My brother and I stayed over for a few days that particular Thanksgiving weekend, so we were able to enjoy the taste of squirrel and dumplings, which didn’t taste all that much different than the version of the dish that had chicken as the meat ingredient.
That wasn’t even the first time I had eaten something I had seen alive and killed before my eyes. Fishing was a favorite pastime of my grandfather, and before he died we would go every weekend to one of the artificial lakes in northern Mississippi that had been built for flood control to wander out among the branches of the submerged trees in a flat-bottomed aluminum boat, seeking the “right spot” to hang a trot-line or to dip a minnowed hook into. One wonderful day we caught 20 fish, around 14 bream and 6 catfish. I watched as my father and his father hit the catfish over the head with a bat to kill them (they didn’t die easy) so they could skin them. That was the most humane way they could find, and they did indeed try to be humane while still recognizing that they were killing so they could eat.
My grandfather died in his 50s from lung cancer after a lifetime of smoking. It is the one time I can recall my father ever having a real catch in his breath.
Even with the perspective on death gained from being around those who see it often, the sense of loss remains, perhaps made even more keen because of the familiarity.
My father was diagnosed with bladder cancer in April of 2004, when I was moving to France for my expatriate assignment. Since the prognosis was good, he insisted I not change my plans but instead to move and enjoy life in Europe.
My father never smoked.
A few weeks ago, cancer was discovered in my father’s abdomen that had spread from his bladder cancer, despite the six months of chemotherapy.
Today, Thanksgiving in the United States, I am taking photos of my appliances here in France so I can sell them quickly, and I am sorting through my things here, figuring out what needs to go on the air shipment that I will get in two or three weeks and what I can do without for two or three months as it goes by surface transport. I have lived in France for a little over 18 months.
Today many are writing of what they are thankful for on this holiday.
One might think that in my circumstance I would have trouble finding something to be thankful for while I rush around trying to arrange a move from one nation to another across an ocean, with my Dad lying in a hospital bed over a thousand miles away with inoperable, malignant cancer, hoping that his health doesn’t decline so precipitously that a 10 day delay might make the difference between being there and not if and when he dies.
I have no trouble knowing what I am thankful for.
My father was loaded with responsibilities from his twenty-first year, a wife, a new child, both to care for in an era that was filled with uncertainty in the wake of Presidential assassinations, mounting foreign conflicts, and a rising threat of nuclear annihilation from the Soviet Union. He married my Mom when she turned 21 and lost her home with her grandmother. You see, that was when the veteran’s survivor benefits because of her father’s sacrifice in the Pacific in World War II ended. She was living with her grandmother because her mother was an alcoholic who couldn’t care for herself, much less her three daughters, so my Mom’s grandmother volunteered to take on the children, if she also got the veteran’s benefits to the surviving children.
My Dad married my Mom when she was kicked out of her house and had nowhere to go. Not too long afterward, I was on the way.
My Dad had no time to live for himself, because he has spent his entire life caring for others.
Those of us who know my father are sad at the prospect of his illness, with more chemotherapy that weakens him to where he can barely walk and the possibility that the treatment will not work well enough to avoid the fate that always casts a black shadow over any diagnosis of cancer, a lingering and painful death. We are not sad for ourselves, we are sad for him.
We were all hoping after a life of hard work dedicated to caring for his family, not just his wife and sons but the extended family as well, he would have a long, healthy retirement to enjoy for himself.
The healthy retirement is not to be, and the length itself is uncertain to the point I am moving back to the US faster than anyone else in my company has before.
With this sadness looming darkly over me, what do I have to be thankful for?
I am thankful I moved to France.
I have been told by my Mom that my Dad has been living the adventures he missed through me, though he cannot tell me this himself. The opportunities I have been offered and grasped are those he never felt he could take because of his responsibilities, but my experiences have given him what he could never seize for himself.
Somehow, through some miracle, despite my missteps, I have managed to give my father what he missed because he chose responsibility over himself and what he wanted.
So notwithstanding the frantic efforts to sell appliances on short notice in a foreign country where I still don’t have a good handle on how things are done, the rapid packing, the worries about both the move and my father, I am thankful I moved to France and gave my Dad something he would never otherwise have had.
I recently wrote:
My father has been the shining light guiding my life.
Was he perfect?
No, no man is, not for around 2000 years.
But, he did his best.
Can anyone ever ask for anything more?
I have been extraordinarily fortunate, because both my parents, for any problems or faults they had or have, they both have always tried their best for their children, for me and my brother.
What else can anyone expect or ask?
I know what I’m thankful for, and I’m eternally grateful that I gave a little bit back to my Dad.
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