Solitudinarian is a word. It is entry number 922.5 in my Roget’s International Thesaurus, Third Edition, a word grouped with recluse, hermit and, get this, “closet cynic.” Well there is nothing like the fall and winter parade of holidays to bring out the closet cynic in me, old solitudinarian that I am. When you elect me president my first proclamation will be to outlaw Thanksgiving in odd numbered years, Christmas in even numbered years. Every other year is often enough, citizens. We need room to breathe, to restore our appetites for communion, glee and cheer.
Grocery stores show me this is so. These days you can’t meet one holiday without another lurking nearby. Just as notebooks, pencils and pens are done flying off the shelves for back to school, there arrives the orange orbs of Halloween, and as candy goes on sale the plastic fall foliage for Thanksgiving tables begs your attention. When you buy your turkey, however, you need to navigate through tinsel and red and green this and that. I might be meditating on gratitude, but I feel an army of the icons of Christmas cheer assembling to seize my attention, be it an angelic host of songs on the radio or a swarm of Santas poised to ho-ho-ho me into Merry-Merry Land.
My cynicism can keep me awake through the night as I revise my worldview on economics and the end times. To sweeten sleeplessness recently I blinked in the dark making a list in my head of Places I Have Spent Thanksgiving. There were the years of watching my father carve the mother-made turkey. There were the years after his death when the dining room table felt bleak without him at the head of it, so Thanksgiving became a picnic toted out to the desert where family, friends and strays gathered around a table made from plywood on sawhorses, and the turkey was the same mother-made delicious miracle pulled out of an old warming oven that kept it safe on the miles from Phoenix to the Carefree highway. To sit by a campfire afterwards with a second piece of pumpkin pie on a paper plate was pure heaven. Other years I worked the holiday. I was a payroll clerk at the Camelback Inn resort, but the new banquet halls were so big all the staff pitched in; I wore a French maid black and white uniform to serve chocolate mouse to hundreds of diners, I kid you not. Then there were the years of pilgrimages with sweethearts to have Thanksgiving in iconic dining rooms like the El Tovar at the Grand Canyon and the Copper Queen Hotel in Bisbee. And years when four days off meant grab your backpack and take a hike. The years I taught English 102 in the fall nurtured my holiday cynicism. Thanksgiving then meant closing the door on communal cheer to meet the endless stack of essays that needed grading. I ate no turkey: it was canned chili with paragraphs about Ma Joad’s sacrifices for her family in The Grapes of Wrath. I dipped oatmeal cookies in coffee to stay attentive through student speculations on Walter’s dreams in A Raisin in the Sun.
One year I drove across the country to visit my exotic uncle the oil engineer who lived in a tower of condos on the Hudson River. I thought sure he’d take me out for a lavish Thanksgiving spread, and maybe we’d see that famous parade in NYC too. But no, he made us his usual bachelor dinner of hotdogs with frozen green beans. Dessert was listening to classical music while he smoked. Finally decades later I was in the city on the eve of Thanksgiving and I saw those famous balloons. The night before the parade the balloons are inflated on the Upper West Side near the American Museum of Natural History. What a hoot to walk along Columbus Avenue as rubber figures grow to building size. I took photos of a giant Snoopy smiling and a wobbly turkey big enough to ride a semi truck. But when I saw Charlie Brown face down under a big net my inner cynic kicked in again and I thought, that’s what many people feel like at holiday dinners, captured by jolly customs, caught in a large net of obligation, duty and expectation.
It took me years to learn the sweetness of choosing alternatives to customary rituals. Instead of making big plans, a blank holiday might become a spacious walk with a friend and her dog, or unexpected studio time to write a song, or a day to explore a new road, which is what I did some years ago, the last time there was a record stretch of days without fall precip. That Thanksgiving, knowing the dirt roads would still be dry, I headed north of the Peaks to explore around SP Crater. I wanted winter shadows and yellow grass instead of pumpkin pie and turkey. I left behind the pile of student essays that needed comments to feel my ribs expand with breathing deep on the tailgate of my truck. Sipping Earl Gray tea from a thermos, I admired the clusters of sagebrush—like free range turkeys?–and the huddle of cinder cones–like a herd of parade balloons? A speck on the horizon caught my eye. A hunter on a quad, I thought, but no, half an hour later when I looked up from my sketchbook I saw a cowboy on a horse. He drew near, curious and apologetic. He was concerned. Was I OK? Was I stranded out there in the middle of nowhere on a holiday? No, I said, but thanks for checking. I was out there just…seeing. He nodded at the sketchbook and rode away. Did he feel the lines I added to paper, the curves of the back of his hat, the flick of a sketch to show the horsetail in motion. Out there beyond the net of gravy and pie, I felt most grateful for what I have felt grateful for before: another day wandering in beautiful Arizona.
