Thanksgiving. Yes friends, yes food, yes squirrels looking like they’ve been electrocuted.
The holidays are kicking into third. It’s the dark part of the year, and we squeeze the sunlight for every drop.
Sixty-nine percent of those polled by the Pew Research Center say being with people is their favorite holiday activity, 11 percent prefer religious reflection, and 33 percent say commercialization and financial dread leave them cold. Yet 86 percent of us buy gifts.
We sat in the sun on Sunday, plopped down on those weird chairs that you can stack so anyone can pick up six at a time and move them. They are light and inflexible and feel as sturdy as a plastic 6-pack ring.
No more than a billion were made. With a cushion they’re almost like real chairs. No cupholders.
It was refreshing to be outside watching hawks and herons play with the wind instead of huddled next to the garage woodstove packaged in sweaters.
He mentioned that we can’t shoot guns – “a joyful noise” – anymore because the neighborhood has grown and there are more people and dogs and kayak trucks and we might as well live in downtown Denton. We managed to keep from getting all twisted up about people showing up from California and Texas and buying all the land they can get their hands on, punching wells, raising property taxes, tailgating and acting like they’re in heaven. (Please don’t let heaven be this noisy.)
Oh well. We’d all be stodgy without change.
We were entertained by live music. Not the cello we’re accustomed to, and we both miss the little girl who practiced her trumpet on Sunday afternoons (she grew up and got married and probably moved to Denton). Sunday’s music was a keyboard, drums, electric guitar and an untrained but on-key countertenor who kept our fingers thrumming.
Everything was all fine. Until the gunfire.
Fifteen rounds from a 9mm, he said a Glock, I said a Taurus only because it didn’t matter and I didn’t know.
Then again, 15 more rounds.
“Hope they’re not shooting the band,” we agreed.
“Hey! Remember the time the guy who lived right over there retired and was home every day driving his wife crazy? He really loved to mow? Did it twice a week and always on Friday afternoon?”
“Yep,” he said.
“Well, let me tell you again anyway,” I said. “He got his weedwhacker out one sunny morning and his wife walked him around the yard pointing out what not to get close to with that grass-and-flower straight razor attached to a motor. She had transplanted some shamrocks and other young, shy, camouflaged plants and told him she really didn’t want him to get anywhere near them.”
He cleared his throat, so I plunged on.
“When he was finished weedeating, he took his 2-cycle trimmer with its blaring whine and indestructible plastic string back to his workshop.
“His wife walked out and all her transplants, plus several dozen of her standard favorites, were lying dead, de-stemmed, cut to the dirt. Gone. Remember that?”
“Yep.”
He was half suffering, half twinkling.
“The way I heard it, the two of them walked back in the house in silence until he said, ‘I’m really sorry.’
“You stay here,” she said, and shut the outside door behind her.
In 30 minutes or so, she was back. She filled his plate with beans, greens and cornbread. She poured sweet tea.
They didn’t talk.
After lunch, he sauntered back to his workshop, head down. He knew he’d done her wrong.
He walked into the shop, and there on the table was his pride Henry .30-30 deer rifle. Without the walnut stock she had sawed off. With a handsaw.
“It was quieter that way,” she said later.
He sat up straight in his plastic chair.
“I sure miss her,” he said. “Thanksgiving was her favorite day of the year. She cooked, she invited friends who played stand-up bass and fiddle and harmonica. It was her event, only on that day but always on that day.”
His wife got her point across, she made him feel how she felt. She loved him totally for more than half a century.
And he’s still weedeating and talking to her in his head every day. And we’re not doing target practice anymore.