What to do on Thanksgiving

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Take

the torch

down from the wall

and bravely wake

the sleeping giant

of your soul

Stir

dormant magnificence

out of her crouching

fraction of light

Strengthen

hibernating

hips arms and legs

into stomp

and thunder

on the dance floor of

your particular praise!

This is my daily goal, not just on Thanksgiving.

Friends around the world do not necessarily know about American Thanksgiving, how it began and why we celebrate, what we celebrate. Here's an explanation I wrote to a friend in another country. It's the traditional, happy, non-NativeAmerican view of the holiday:

Legend is that it began with the first European settlers to America. They didn't know about the New World's agriculture. The Native Americans befriended and helped them understand and raise the crops that were new to them, like corn. So when harvest time came, they had a big feast and included their new friends, celebrating together. Every year they celebrated again, and so the tradition continued. Abraham Lincoln made it a national holiday in the 1860s. Since then it has become the most beloved holiday in the U.S., because there is no religious affiliation, no gifts to buy, no commerce outside of food, no complications (except family). People just gather and express thanks for what we have. Traditionally we eat a turkey, which they would have eaten in the 1600s, along with fish and other meats and vegetables like pumpkin, squash and corn. It is a beautiful idea.

BUT the truth is that the European immigrants to the New World brought the most horribly annihilating devastation to the Native Americans that it almost seems like a cruel joke that we celebrate with thanks today. (I also sent this information to my friend.) I don't know how to reconcile these two perspectives, and I don't think there is any reconciliation. I do think the day provides an opportunity to face straight on what has been done in the name of God (the Pilgrim settlers thanked God, not the Native Americans), commerce, and "progress." You can watch a powerfully honest look at the Native American view of Thanksgiving here; I warn you, it isn't pretty or happy.

So, this is what we do. We investigate our shadow and destruction. We do what we can to make it right. We wake up. As Rob Brezsny says, we can always, always be thankful for all our blessings, both the pleasurable ones, and the painful ones, because they wake us up.

Wake up, wake up, and be thankful that you are awake. Love your family and friends, love your neighbor, love your enemy, and celebrate when you stop seeing them as your enemy. Isn't that something to dance about, in wild abandon?

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The Willow Ball!

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As Winter gets ready to hook her come-hither finger around the neck of the sun, our inner rooms begin to come alive with the warm glow of lamps, candles, a fireplace or wood stove, and a samovar for tea. It can only mean that the holidays are coming, and to start the season off properly, the Lady of Willow Manor shall throw her annual ball where everyone is welcome, no one excluded. With our bloggy imaginations we can publish fantasies right here with our fingers, choosing our dream escort and rich attire to adorn our perfect bodies. We are able to dance like gods and goddesses all cyber-night long. Maybe every girl who dreams of her someday-wedding gown at age five is really just dreaming of a ball. Which of us dreamed of anything as elegant (and sizzingly fun!) as Willow's Ball? And guess what, it's on the night of the full moon. With or without a full moon, no matter how perfectly envisioned and planned, things can go wildly out of control; you would not believe the stories from years gone by! Half the fun is reading reports of goings-on in the comments at Willow's blog the night of the ball! (Last year's here.) The ball is tomorrow, there's still time to gather your accoutrements and wits. Your invitation is here; Tess will have a Mr. Linky up in the next 24 hours or so. I didn't think I was in the mood for a ball, and here I am going on and on!

Update: Willow has declared the ball open, there are already acres of cars parked and terabytes of blogs to visit. The festivities are here!

I chose the white lace dress with yellow trims by James Tissot, at top. The whole scene is evocative, and although the painting is titled The Gallery of HMS Calcutta (Portsmouth), some call it Remembrance of an Onboard Ball. A ball on a small ship? Wow. The dress looks good from this side, I think, the side you see on the dance floor.

As for who will go with me, I don't plan on taking a chaperone, as in Tissot's painting. Just a man.

I learned last year, with my fine escort Fitzwilliam Darcy, that a dreamily handsome and charming date is not necessarily the best choice. I barely got one dance with him. He was popular even with the men! Quite a change from the snob who turned his nose up at dancing in certain ballrooms. But he had lost his pride, and anyway he could see that at Willow's Ball, everyone is a fine dance partner.

Because Leo Tolstoy has been my close companion for over a year (I hold him affectionately in my hands: War and Peace), after fingering through potential escorts in my heart's little black book, I realized he would be the perfect partner for the ball. After he picks me up in his skiff and we bob up river to the Manor, he will settle in with a book in a nook. (I offered him my Kindle—not Nook—to re-read W and P, but he said he's more interested in Rilke's letters from Russia.)

Tolstoy is not one for balls, despite his noble upbringing. But his choice of an ascetic life, he assures me, will not cause him undue discomfort in the presence of so much frivolous ruffle and draped satin. He craves the music. He is well on in years, and tired, so he will sit and listen, or read, while I dance the night away with whomever I wish. When I am fagged from waltzes and fox trots and need a few moments' rest, he will be waiting in his radiant corner to captivate me in conversation. Don’t worry about him being bored and neglected. See how he holds the chair open next to him? You too can sit and carry on discourse with Monsieur Tolstoy when you need a rest. I will concede this so long as I can cut in. I doubt very much that the chair will be empty for long, as we will all need a rest now and then, and hushed dialog about many things. (I want to tell him, for instance, what came of his epistolary acquaintance with Mohandas Gandhi a few decades after they corresponded for a year about nonviolent resistance until the end of his life in 1910.) At Tess’s Willow Ball, all things are possible, because while Monsieur Tolstoy speaks Russian and French, and I don't, we will magically understand one another.

Notes about the paintings:

The Gallery of HMS Calcutta (Portsmouth), circa 1876, sometimes called Remembrance of an Onboard Ball, by James Tissot, Tate collection

"Tissot often painted a man with two women in order to explore the subtle nuances of flirtation and attraction through body language and facial expression. Here a chaperone separates the young naval officer from the object of his attentions, the woman hiding her enjoyment of his flirtation behind her fan. Tissot focuses here on the boundaries of Victorian propriety and social convention, and their transgression. The languid pose of the nearest woman, and Tissot’s frank concentration on her fashionable hour-glass figure, inevitably led to the picture being criticised when it was first exhibited. The author Henry James dismissed it as ‘hard, vulgar and banal’." (From the display caption August 2004)

Leo Tolstoy, by Leonid Pasternak

This painting of my companion was done by Leonid Pasternak, father of the poet and novelist Boris Pasternak, best known for his novel Doctor Zhivago. Pasternak was a friend of Tolstoy's and painted illustrations for Tolstoy's novels. More info about Pasternak in a short bit I wrote for the Rilke blog here.

André Rieu is rehearsing Shostakovich's Russian Waltz for tomorrow night!

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As if

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As if

I should have known something was up
when we told the host our name, and he instantly
gestured and led us to a table by the brick wall,
as if it belonged to us - now, always, ad infinitum,

as if we were a quiet, gray couple in Chicago
or St. Louis, who have had that standing table
for fifty years and nod to the maitre d with familiarity
every week, not just on anniversaries and birthdays.

So when I saw the exuberance of flowers and tissue paper
my husband had asked a florist to deliver - magenta and chartreuse,
bold and lusty, as if this tabletop was a declaration
of young new love, as if the bee were seducing the flower -

when I saw them, the room swam, and almost in a swoon I struggled
to take off my chartreuse coat and hang it on the back
of a chair. I said, Oh, the camera is in the car, and dutifully he left for it.
He left, and he didn't return. I waited. After 32 years,

where could he be? A siren drowned out the music, and then
one emotion was traded for another. I called him on my magenta
phone. No answer. I jumped up and ran out the door,
down the street to the parked car. Not

there. As if he, like a bee, had made his brief, purposeful visit
and left the flower, alone. Ad infinitum. I waited.
In actuality, it was no more than ten minutes. You see,
he found primroses on the sidewalk for sale.

Primroses, that I love and have not tucked into
a flower bed since three houses ago. Primroses
that were being taken inside for the night,
that would not be there after dinner. He bought four.

And as if he had died and come back to life,
when he returned to our table I was about to weep,
just when the waitress swept up to tell us
the night's specials: grouper and mahi mahi and trout,

and I told her to please go away, we needed no pretty
young women selling fish and champagne. Out of the
16,819,200 minutes we'd been together, just now we needed five
secluded on our island of love, with only the hot tropical flowers as witness.

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"They've messed with the wrong one now!"

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To read more about the Montgomery Bus Boycott, go here.
To read more about Rosa Parks, go here, or read her autobiography, Rosa Parks, My Story.
To see the story of the restoration of the bus, go here.
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