Thanksgiving 2020: It's going to be OK

 

I had to laugh when a friend posted this today.

I think I've written a Thanksgiving post every year for the past 10 years. I'm too lazy to check. Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday and it falls during NaBloPoMo, when I usually post a blog post every day in November. This year I'm not doing NaBloPoMo and I'm not planning that big Thanksgiving dinner. I'm not offering invitations to friends and strangers who have no place to go or who don't feel welcome with their family or who would just rather let someone else do all that cooking ... or my kids, who don't really have a choice on their mom's favorite holiday. I don't celebrate Easter and I'll even give up Christmas Day (although it turns out they won't. God love them) but Thanksgiving is my day.

This year -- the year of 2020 -- my day has been coopted by a tiny, vicious, virulent, politicized, stupid-head virus. Although I still have much to give thanks for, Thanksgiving won't be the same. And you know what? I'll get through it and so will you if we're smart and lucky and we manage to stay healthy. Some of us won't be so lucky ... but this is about Thanksgiving.

Here's how I know I can get through a Thanksgiving with just my 9-year-old granddaughter Coraline and me at the table: I've done it before. I was a military wife for over 20 years, and I've been alone on my favorite holiday more than once. 

The first time I was 23 and we were stationed at Robins AFB in Georgia, living in a duplex in base housing. It was our first year there, and we'd been there less than a year. I don't remember where LtColEx was -- England, maybe Iceland or Alaska. He was a navigator on a KC-135 refueling plane, so he flew all over the world and was sometimes TDY (temporary duty) for weeks or months at a time. We couldn't afford for me to fly to Iowa, and I didn't want to make the long drive alone. So I stayed home alone. 

And it wasn't so bad. My overtly Christian neighbors across the street brought over a plate from their dinner for me. Bless them. They didn't approve of me. I blasted Led Zeppelin from the speakers in our little white Chevette when I washed it in the driveway; they blasted fiery sermons back, hoping to save unsuspecting passersby or better yet, me. I was immune, but I accepted the plate of turkey, mashed potatoes and gravy, green beans, and dressing with gratitude, and they safely discharged their Christian duty.

Later I went next door and ate dinner with our friends Sharon and Dave, who shared bedroom walls with us. They had made turkey with all the trimmings too, and I was even invited to eat at their table. It was just the three of us, and we had a lovely low-key dinner.  I saved the other plate for the next day.

The next year LtColEx was home, only he wasn't home. He was sitting alert at the  alert facility near the airfield on the other side of the base. Alert means just what it sounds like: Air Force fliers standing ready in case they need to take off quickly and go drop a bomb on something. Every three weeks if they weren't TDY the flyers had to live together in a little dorm-like facility so they could stay close to the four B-52 bombers and four KC-135 refuelers that sat on a special runway inside a second security gate. There was a family visitation center nearby with a large gathering space, a kitchen with a microwave, and three small private rooms with a couch and a TV in two of them. In the evenings the flyers would meet their wives and kids, if they had them, to spend a few hours together.

That year I cooked our turkey dinner at home and transported it to the family center in our big wooden picnic basket that had been a wedding gift. We got lucky that night and arrived in time to get one of the rooms with a TV, where we ate our dinner and watched one of three fuzzy channels and were glad we were together.

The next year we were both home, and I made the turkey dinner for us and for Dave, who was TDY and staying in the officer's quarters that year. He and Sharon had gotten orders to another base earlier in the year. We also hosted one of the first women to navigate the KC-135s. She arrived two hours late so the turkey was dry and the mashed potatoes were cold, but we still enjoyed our Thanksgiving, because we were together.

I've got decades of Thanksgivings under my belt now. The kids and I spent a couple of them without LtColEx, because he was in Korea or somewhere else. For years my little brother came every year and always made the gravy, which is my nemesis.  Now he lives 700 miles away, and he has his own Thanksgiving dinner with his close friends. I've always invited people to be with us if I could, and some came year after year, and then for various reasons were replaced by other friends. Often I'll post an invitation on Facebook for anybody who doesn't have a place to go just to keep the "giving" in Thanksgiving.

Also, I love feeding people, and I love feeding people a big traditional turkey dinner. I've done it so often the menu rarely changes: roast turkey, bread sage stuffing (I tried a delicious wild rice with dried apricots stuffing one time and my kids threatened mutiny if I did it again), mashed potatoes, gravy that doesn't set up until after dinner because now I have to make it myself, green beans with bacon and almonds, sweet potato casserole with apples and marshmallows, homemade cranberry sauce, Grandma Bolton's secret-recipe rolls, fresh pumpkin pie and dark chocolate bourbon pecan pie with homemade whipped cream. (Cool Whip is not allowed in my house. Don't even try. That shit isn't real food.)

Some of my best holiday memories come not from Christmas, but from Thanksgiving. The year I killed my own turkey and she was so long (not balled up like a store-bought turkey), she kicked the lid off the roaster and I had to put a 10-pound weight on it to hold the lid down. The year I started the oven on fire and almost burned up the bread and the pies. The year Colorado's husband-at-the-time stood out in the kitchen after the dishes were done and the rest of us had gone to the living room and ate all the turkey leftovers. We got rid of him. Jerk. The first Thanksgiving after LtColEx moved out and my sister and  brother flew in from Iowa and Minneapolis. I upped my game and made homemade butter while they sat at  my kitchen bar and we talked and drank wine. When it was finally done we spread it on homemade bread, so eager to try it, and it tasted .... just like butter. Any butter. Fucking Kroger butter. The year one annual guest announced three times that she'd rather get Chinese food and watch a movie than do Thanksgiving dinner the next year. I had to physically restrain Colorado. We lost her in a divorce. Buh bye. The year I made the regular turkey and a Tofurkey because I was a vegetarian, and the Tofurkey was so bad even the dog wouldn't touch it. Who knew tofu isn't meat? Three years ago when I went home to Iowa for my mom's big 80th birthday party, and we turned around the next day and had Thanksgiving together on Sunday, because that's when she liked to do her dinner so everybody could make it. Except me. I hadn't been home for Thanksgiving in decades. We didn't know it would be her last Thanksgiving as we ate our smoked turkey and my brother's good gravy. I could go on, but you probably have your own memories.

And what about Thanksgiving 2020? What will we say about Thanksgiving when we look back on this year? I'm not sure yet how it will go, but here's what I expect.

Plan A. Even though I'm not inviting anybody over, I will get a turkey and  roast it in my roaster. And then after I take the meat off that bird, I'll probably  put it back in the roaster and make some soup stock. Or maybe I won't. I won't feel guilty if I don't. I'll make the mashed potatoes and gravy, the green beans, some sour dough rolls, a fresh pumpkin pie, and maybe even a wild rice stuffing with dried apricots. I probably won't make the sweet potatoes or the cranberry sauce, because the two of us can only eat so much. Coraline and I will enjoy our dinner, because it will be delicious. Maybe we'll video chat with family and friends throughout the day. Maybe we'll watch a movie that we have to pay for. We'll still stuff ourselves like any other Thanksgiving and then we'll take the dog for a walk so we can eat more later.

I'll find out if the single guys who live on either side of me are home and I'll take them a plate and tell them next year I'll expect them at my dinner table. 

We will not go inside anybody else's house, and we'll feel fine, because we're keeping ourselves and our loved ones safe. And because we still have blessings to count. And we'll have tons of left-overs!

Plan B. My son Drake and my daughter-in-law Montana have a big yard -- almost an acre. If the weather is nice, we might bring our dinners together and eat outside, socially distanced, masked when we need to. Plan B is looking less likely as the COVID numbers skyrocket here in Ohio though. Our governor can't find his balls to do anything more than urge us to wear masks and weakly enforce a curfew for the fucktards who insist on partying in bars, but the board of health in my county has issued a stay-at-home advisory, which we are going to follow.

Also, Montana is an ER nurse, and as the COVID beds are now all full, the ER staff are taking care of more and more COVID patients. We'll judge the safety of an outdoor dinner next week. We don't want our 2020 Thanksgiving memory to be .... well, you know.

Here's one thing I know: We can all get through a Thanksgiving, and even a Christmas, either alone or with only the people we live with. We can. I've done it. We may be sad, but sad is better than dead or damaged for life. Feelings are temporary. COVID too often is not.

Oh, I forgot about Plan C. Once I can safely do it, I'm going to have the biggest Thanksgiving dinner ever and I'm going to fill my house and my porches and my yard with people eating and giving thanks. I don't care if I do it in July or September or April. I will reclaim Thanksgiving from 2020 and I will make many more Thanksgiving memories to hold in my heart.

Please stay safe and well as we roll into what will be an unusual and difficult holiday season, my friends. We can do this.

What's inevitable?

I started watching a movie tonight, Taking Chance. I don't know why I thought I could get through it. Because Kevin Bacon is hot? Because Kevin Bacon wearing a military uniform and oak leaves -- even if it is a Marine uniform -- is even hotter? I didn't get through it. This definitely wasn't a night when I should have tried to watch that movie. After writing about Memorial Day Monday night, this wasn't even the week for watching that movie.

But I did start thinking, or wondering .... some things almost seem like fate, like they are going to happen no matter how unlikely, how improbable, they are.

That I would become an officer's wife was one of the most unlikely things that could have happened. When I was a little kid, I remember watching the bodies coming off the planes from Vietnam. It was horrifying and I couldn't look away. When I was a teenager, the military was the enemy. The draft. The long, unfair war. The lies that came out. Nobody I knew would have anything to do with the fucking military.

Except my first love, L,  the boy I fell in love with in high school. We were together for a while, and then we broke up. Sort of. We dated other people, and every once in a while we went out together just to stay in touch. He always said we would get married after he graduated from college and went into the Air Force to become an astronaut. He was 2 years older than I was, and he was on the track to becoming an Air Force officer. Class president, swing choir, football/wrestling/track star, National Honor Society. I don't know what else. I wasn't into guys like that, but I was into him. And I believed we would get married eventually. In the meantime, I was having too much fun being a bad girl to care about the future.

Even though we didn't go steady for long during high school .... even though he went steady with a cheerleader longer than we did ..... I felt a connection, a bond that seemed inevitable. Our dads went to school together. His dad was the fastest runner in the 8th grade. At the 8th-grade graduation from country school,  my grandma beat him in a race. And later he was my junior high principal and first basketball coach. My cousin married L's older brother.

The first time I got drunk I was with L, and I went to my first concert with him. I know you'll be curious so I'll tell you. We slept together, but we never went all the way. He was truly the first boy I loved, but more than that .... I felt that connection. I can't explain it.

L went away to college, joined ROTC. We got together sometimes when he came home, but we weren't "together." It was fine. We would get married when he graduated and went into the Air Force.

Except he didn't. I left home when I was 17 and moved to Iowa City. L would show up sometimes and surprise me. It caused problems with the guy I was dating, but I didn't care. L came first. We were going to be married. We were connected.

But then he got into drugs -- pot and other stuff too -- and he dropped out of ROTC and then college. He was driving a truck. The last few times I saw him, I was already living with LtColEx. L would drop in unexpectedly, sometimes in the middle of the night. The last time, LtColEx loaned him money. He was a mess for a while.

And the connection was broken. I felt it when it broke. It was there like a familiar, safe cord tying us together, and then it was gone.

 L got his shit together relatively quickly. He wasn't meant to be a burnt out loser. But it didn't matter. Something too big to get back had changed.

And the connection with LtColEx was there and it was even stronger. We got married when I was 18, which was a huge shock to everyone who knew us. (I was not pregnant.) L never talked to me again after he heard we were engaged. In fact, when we did end up in the same bar on the square in my hometown one night, he got up and left as soon as I walked in.

LtColEx never intended to go into the military. Never. When he told people he'd decided to go to officer training school, they were stunned. His dad tried to talk him out of it, but we'd already decided. We wanted out of Iowa, and he had a choice of managing a Color Tile, going back to the farm, or becoming an Air Force officer. We chose the Air Force.

L chose the family farm. And one of the things LtColEx and I said we would never do, no matter how much his grandfather begged, was go back to the family farm.

I have to wonder -- because Miss Serendipity does spend a lot of time fucking with my life -- if my marrying an Air Force officer was somehow inevitable. It certainly wasn't a lifestyle I dreamed of or even wanted. I was rebel. If ever there was a poor potential officer's wife, I was the one. I didn't know one damn thing about it when LtColEx dragged me out of my job tending bar to our first assignment. My learning curve was steep and painful. It wasn't a fit.

And yet ..... there was that connection, and it's still there. Now it's born of all those years as a military wife in a military family. But it seems it was there before. Why, I don't know.

If L had stayed in ROTC and gone into the Air Force would I have married him, and would I have a couple of blond, blue-eyed kids today? Who knows? We can't see alternate universes. But I think .... maybe ..... maybe, yes. I think so.

I haven't talked to L since the last time he showed up stoned and broke and sad in the middle of the night. I want to be clear: that was a detour for him. It wasn't who he was, but lots of people get lost for a while at that age. For years -- later -- he sat with my mom and her husband at hometown high school football games. My niece was friends with his daughter. Every time I go home I hope I'll run into him, but I haven't. In a town of 2000 or fewer people, I haven't.

My mom says I think too much, and it's probably true. But this week, after I wrote about what it's like to lose friends and to worry about being the next wife to watch that blue car pull into the driveway, I have to wonder: Is there such a thing as destiny?

Do you have any destiny stories? Has anything ever happened to you that was unlikely and yet inevitable?

I mean, seriously, I could have married Kevin Bacon, but he only plays a military officer in a movie. Not the same thing at all.

Mmmm. Bacon.

That's not a dildo

A few months ago I ran across an article with an interesting title. Interesting to me, that is, because as I've written here last night before, I spent 20 years as a military wife. Because LtColEx and I were apart for long stretches during many of those years, the title of the article intrigued me: "A Thousand Dildos for the Military Wives."

I tucked it away in a file and didn't read it because it seemed obvious from the title what was going on. I predicted some adult toy company was going to donate dildos to the poor military wives who are left at home lonely and sexless while their husbands are off at war. Better than what I got when LtColEx was gone for weeks at a time, which was ..... nothing.

No wait, I did get something. A 5-minute phone call once a week on what's called the "autovon line." It was 3 years before I was made aware that someone at the squadron had to listen to every one of our phone calls, and the monitor couldn't be turned off. Everybody took their turn at autovon duty, so we had no privacy.

I looked forward to those 5 minutes every week, but maybe a dildo would have been less embarrassing that what some of the airmen might have overheard before I was told they were listening. Anyway .....

Tonight I finally read the article. Really read it all the way through. And ... dildos for the military wives my ass! No military wives are going to get dildos, much less a thousand of them. No, sir. What this article is about is military wives giving long-distance hand jobs to their husbands during what could only be called a virtual booty call.

This article is about a device called RealTouch, which yes, you can buy right this very minute for about $250. (And isn't it just typical the man "dildo" costs 1/6 of the price of a Sybian? This whole thing just reeks of male privilege.)

The original purpose of the device is so men can pretend they're fucking porn stars by synching up with porn movies. But the manufacturer is such a humanitarian, he decided he'd expand his market to military families, because you know, so many military wives look and act like porn stars. He's trying to contact the military so he can share this "genuine social benefit" with military couples all over the world. Step aside, Bill Gates.

I don't really want to promote this thing, but we've come this far. You might as well learn how it works.

One half of the "unit" looks like a big loaf of white bread with a slit in it. The author of the article writes that "the unit warms up, lubes up, pulses and grips any item stuck into it." That's his unit. His dildo.

The other half -- her half -- looks like .... fuck it. Here's a photo.

You wouldn't believe the shit I had to look at just so I could show you this photo.

As I said, dildos for the military wives my ass. It's a motorized, long-distance hand-job.

Now, I'm not going to say long, frequent separations aren't hard on the old sex life. They are. But the last thing I was thinking about when LtColEx was gone was giving him a virtual hand job. I had a hundred extra worries, but whether he needed a hand job wasn't one of them.

No, my worries ran more toward swapping out the guts in a broken toilet (damn ballcocks), helping Drake carve pinewood derby cars, changing flat tires, and cleaning up puke when both kids and I had the flu at the same time.

If he'd called me on the autovon line, wasted the five minutes I had to whine about how everything was going wrong, and asked for a fucking hand job, I would have emailed him divorce papers the next day. Along with the other half of his fucking unit.

Dildos for the military wives. What was the author of this article thinking? This has nothing to do with dildos or with wives. He put his finger in the "unit" and got a finger job. You can't put your finger in a dildo. Idiot.

Well, hell, I'm just disappointed. I thought maybe somebody finally wanted to do something nice for the military wives. Like maybe being a military wife had become sexy. First dildos, then Sybians. Keep the wives happy and the troops will be happy too!

But no. I was terribly misled. You can go back to watching Mad Men. No dildos are being handed out here today. Just move along.

Weekend Update: Week 4

 Elvira told me it's pretty boring reading about the plays, movies and parties I go to on the weekends, and I trust her judgement completely. So instead of writing about the young woman who was feeling up my boobs in a smokey dive where I was playing pool (badly, as usual) and singing karaoke last night --yes, that bar-- I'm just going to share some internet stuff that caught my attention.

Weekend Wrap-Up

What made me giggle:

This is silly, but just do it. Just click on this guy's nose. I know, right? It's hard to resist doing it just one more time.

What made me hot:

If you're not sure what to get me for Valentine's Day, consider this your hint. Mmmmmmm. Bacon Lube.

What made me cry sob:

No words.

Somebody posted this photo and story on Facebook: "The night before the burial of her husband 2nd Lt. James Cathey of the United States Marine Corps, killed in Iraq, Katherine Cathey refused to leave the casket, asking to sleep next to his body for the last time. The Marines made a bed for her, tucking in the sheets below the flag. Before she fell asleep, she opened her laptop computer and played songs that reminded her of 'Cat,' and one of the Marines asked if she wanted them to continue standing watch as she slept.

'I think it would be kind of nice if you kept doing it,' she said.

'I think that's what he would have wanted.'"

*******

I am and always will be wild blue yonder all the way, but when it comes to a flag-draped coffin, we're all sisters under the military. I can't count the number of times I stood at my kitchen window holding my breath as I watched a dark blue sedan drive by, and then praying it wasn't going to pull into one of my neighbors' driveways either ... Well done, Marine. Bless your heart.