"GIVING THANKS"

 “GIVING THANKS”

In this national week of Thanksgiving, I am feeling anxious and fatigued, with four main sources.  A good friend of ours died last month, and that has brough home the question of mortality to me.  Another good friend of ours has been seriously ill over the last month, and she is currently back in the hospital.  Third, the raging of the Covid-19 pandemic has all of us afraid and worn out.  And fourth, the Trumpdemic continues – like a three year old throwing a tantrum, he refuses to go away.

I am hoping that Michigan and Pennsylvania will certify their election results this week, showing that the Biden/Harris ticket won their state elections. I am giving thanks that Brad Raffensberger, the conservative Republican secretary of state of Georgia, held the line on the vote in Georgia and certified that Biden/Harris won Georgia.  I believe that Pennsylvania will hold the line, but I’m not so sure about Michigan, where two Republicans hold the key to an early certification.   I have teased our family in Michigan that their state may turn out to be more Trump-captured than Georgia!  I’d be glad to have to eat my words on that one.  We’ll know after 1 PM on Monday.

As we approach Thanksgiving, however, I want to focus on gratitude.  One more word on politics, and then I’ll stop – congratulations to our daughter-in-law Erin Graham who won election to a first term on the Ingham County Commission in Michigan, which includes the capitol city of Lansing.  She has been chair of the East Lansing school board, and she is a fine politician, in the best sense of that word.  Because of Covid-19, none of our family will be with us for Thanksgiving, but we give thanks for the gifts of life and love.

In this time of national chaos on so many levels, I am grateful for the idea of “equality” that continues to flow throughout the American experiment.  It is a powerful and dangerous idea – the idea that all people are created with equal dignity continues to drive all kinds of movements for justice and equity.  Part of the Trumpdemic backlash is a reaction to this flowing of the idea of equality and an attempt to stem its flow.  History is not progressive, so there is no guarantee that this idea of equality will not be stemmed.  Yet, I am grateful to all the 80,000,000 who turned out to vote for the idea of equality, in the middle of a deadly disease and in the middle of voter suppression.  I’m also grateful to all the people who have worked and who continue to work in this dangerous transition period to sustain this idea.

I give thanks for Caroline, for our health, for our kids David and Susan, for Erin and granddaughters Emma and Zoe, and for a whole host of friends who sustain and who continue to nurture us.  I am working on a memoir on my mother and me and her raising me as a single mom in the 1940’s and 50’s.  As I do this, I am meeting many ghosts and spirits, but I have also been deepened in my gratitude to her for her determined love and dedication to me.  As I remember stories and themes, and as I process them for this memoir, my amazement and admiration for her has grown.  I don’t want to make her into Superwoman, but I do want to recognize what she did and what she accomplished in her life.  She was a woman and a single mom of agency is a time when women, and especially single working moms, were seen as inferior beings.  I celebrate her agency and her tenacity in the face of such patriarchy.

I’m also aware of so many women of color, especially Black women, who have been single working moms for many decades because systemic racism has taken the men from their homes.  Many of them have educated me and deepened me and continue to do so.  So much to be grateful for, so much to be afraid of – may the attitude of gratitude prevail in my heart and in all our hearts in these crazy days.  I recommend that we all take to heart the short prayer from the mystic Meister Eckhardt from the 13th century:  “If the only prayer you ever say in your life is ‘Thank You,’ that would be enough.”