A perk of being abroad (for me, at least) is that for Thanksgiving I have a fair chance of choosing how I want to spend my national holiday. Whether it’s joining each other for a “Friendsgiving”, or simply hanging out on my own, it’s a nice moment where I can control the intensity of my day. It also probably helps that I am a vegetarian who does not get excited for Thanksgiving food (unless we are talking about my mother’s apple pie). And so this year is no different.
Today I ultimately decided to take a pause and slow down. I have big ambitions to make a black bean soup recipe that I have been looking at for a few weeks….even if that doesn’t sound like anything that the pilgrims might have consumed—but it works for me.
No matter the figurative size and shape of the plates we’ve got spinning, I think that all of us adults are almost always feeling pretty burned out from the stuff that life sends us. And even while we’re sorting through those things, there is always more coming. Forget the spinning plates expression—it’s more like one of those supermarket conveyor belts where stuff is constantly getting loaded onto the belt and you’re on the other end, trying to sort it all.
Or even better: I’ve been watching this ridiculous pirate TV series as of late, and in one of the scenes, the infamous Captain Blackbeard laments to a crewmember,” Yes, we need a plan! Alright…and then what, we execute the fucking plan and then we get another plan and then what do we do? We execute that and so on and so again and again- it’s all so fucking boring! I shouldn’t be bored I’m fucking Blackbeard!”
I am no 17th century English pirate, but I do agree that there is something repetitive about the human condition.
“Don’t do the cleaning! It’s Thanksgiving for not having to!”
This is the text message I got yesterday from a friend whose counsel I take great stock in. Thanksgiving means being thankful for whatever matters most to you at any given time. And while it is true that my house could use a good day of organizing, it is just a matter of time before it will all come undone again. Pardon the mess, but we live here.
My friend was right. Today is a day to just be here. Be thankful that I don’t have to lift a finger in terms of housework.
Instead, I managed to sleep in until the glorious hour of 7AM (how Rome’s clattering traffic symphony didn’t rouse me earlier, I will never know). The sun was shining and the ground was dry—it had not rained the night before. It had been over a week since I had been out for a run and so I knew before I’d even decided that this was how I’d start my Thanksgiving day. When I stepped outdoors, I was not disappointed.
My sister has been sending me snapshots of the fall foliage of New England for a few weeks. Now, however, is the time that Rome is coming into its own in terms of watching the colors change. As I made my way through the streets, the sun shone through the leaves even as the low angle of the sun cast big tree silhouettes on the ground. It was one of the perfect fall days that you might see in a magazine—but within the frame of actual life does not come as often as you wished. Instead, the autumn season always has a big rainstorm or mashes of muddy leaves mucking up your environment. It’s just another example of a moment that brings me back to that Robert Frost poem; the ephemera that comprises the autumnal glow really is a fleeting thing.
And since I went out for a run a bit later, the sky was already a committed blue color. In the park, this made the fall colors pop even more—just as much as the evergreen pines swinging higher up and contrasting their green against blue. No matter the time of day, whenever I am out and running, I often have Respighi’s I Pini di Villa Borghese in my head. Not just because the heights of the orchestra seem to be reaching up to touch the tops of those pine trees that I pass under in Villa Borghese, but also because the music matches what I identify as sounds from my youngest years. Majestic, renewal, things full of promise. That or perhaps I just watched a lot of old movies and TV shows from those earlier years in the 20th century.
Whether you are with loved ones at Thanksgiving (or any major holiday) or you are apart, as adults it’s easy to encounter conflicted feelings that don’t exactly make the occasion clean and neat. Norman Rockwell, the famous American illustrator, composed a setting that still burns in the memory of many Americans, Freedom From Want. It remains a lovely concept that I find great value in, but as I’ve grown older I have learned to balance this with the other aspects of life. The boring stuff, the fact that we can’t always be together all the time…and indeed the fact that even when we do get together we won’t always have the same perspectives when discussing the topics of the day.
But all of those adult thoughts aside, I have fashioned the day to be a pleasant one devoid of much cleaning at all. Just the dishes from my Thanksgiving meal of black bean soup and a date pudding that I made using dates that my partner brought back from Egypt. They were both delicious—even if they had nothing to do with a traditional American Thanksgiving. And then I still have the colors, sounds and feeling of my morning run in my bones. Because indeed, as I am lucky enough to mark another Thanksgiving, I am grateful that I still have the ability to go out and take part in this simple yet transcendent kind of activity.
It’s been a really wonderful day—even if I couldn’t tell you much at all of what I accomplished. I will say that I did take part in a FaceTime call with my family back home as they all sat around a real table and ate the more standard Thanksgiving fare. As much as a run and spending the day recharging my batteries, I appreciated that time spent just as much. It makes me look forward to the next big holiday where I will not be away. And even then when I am there I will look to the environment and take in what it is like to be at home. Even if the leaves from the trees have fallen and it’s just being indoors and listening to the gentle ruckus. There is much to be thankful for this year, and the simplest things remain the most important ones on my list.