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THANKSGIVING: THE HAPPIEST SAD DAY OF THE YEAR

The saddest thing I ever saw: a small, elderly woman dining alone at Morrison’s Cafeteria, on Thanksgiving Day.

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Oh there are many other sadnesses you can find if you look hard enough, in this variegated world of ours, but a little old lady dining alone on Thanksgiving Day makes you feel really fortunate, guilty, smug, relieved, tearful, grateful…it brings you up short and makes you time-travel to the pockets of joy and cheer you experienced in earlier days.

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Crepe paper. Lots of crepe paper. And construction paper. Bunches of different-colored construction paper. In my childhood home in Tuscaloosa, my Thanksgiving Mother always made sure we creative and restless kids had all the cardboard, scratch paper, partly-used tablets, corrugated surfaces, unused napkins, backs of cancelled checks, rough brown paper from disassembled grocery bags, backs of advertising letters and flyers…anything at all that

we could use to make things.

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Yes, dear 21^st-Century young’uns, we kids back then made things

from scraps.

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We could cut up all we wanted, and cut up we did.

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We cut out rough rectangular sheets from stiff black wrapping paper and glued the edges together to make Pilgrim hats. Old belt buckles were tied to our shoelaces—we never could get it straight, whether the Pilgrims were Quakers, or vice versa, or neither. But it always seemed important to put buckles on our shoes and sandals, wear tubular hats and funny white paper collars, and craft weird-looking guns that flared out like trombones at one end. More fun than being a Pilgrim/Quaker was being an Indian—a true blue Native American, replete with bare chest, feathers shed by neighborhood doves, bows made of crooked twigs and kite string, arrows dulled at the tip by rubber stoppers and corks, and loads of Mother’s discarded rouge and powder and lipstick and mashed cranberries smeared here and there on face and body, to make us feel like the Indians we momentarily were.

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Sister Barbara and Mother would find some long autumnal-hued dresses for the occasion, but they were seldom seen outside the kitchen for hours on end, while the eight-course dinner was under construction.

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There was always an accordion-fold crepe paper turkey centerpiece on display, hastily bought on sale at S.H. Kress, just after last year’s Thanksgiving season. It looked nothing like my Aunt Mattie’s turkeys in her West Blocton front yard. And for some reason, we ate cranberry products on that day and that day only. Nobody ever thought about cranberries the other 364 days!

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And those lucky turkeys were lucky because nobody every thought of eating them except on Thanksgiving and Christmas. They were home free the rest of the year!

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Now, back into the time machine of just a few years ago.

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It is Thanksgiving Day. My wife and son and granddaughter are all out of the country. Other family and relatives are either dead or gone, or just plain tied up with their own lives in other states, doing things other than having Thanksgiving Dinner with me.

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My brother, Tim, my friends Tim Baer and Don Henderson and I decide that we will have to spend Thanksgiving Dinner together, since each of us is bereft of wife or playmate or relative, this particular holiday this particular year.

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So, we wind up at Morrison’s Cafeteria, eating alone together, going through the line and picking out steamed-particle-board turkey, canned cranberries, thin gravy, boxed mashed potatoes and some bakery goods whose source cannot easily be determined.

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But we laugh at our situation and each other, tell jokes, cut up a bit, and thank our lucky stars that this one Thanksgiving Dinner is surely just a fluke. We’ll be trying that much harder, next year, to not get blind-sided by the best holiday of the year, Thanksgiving being the only holiday you don’t have to give gifts or reciprocate gifts or strain to find the correct gifts.

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On Thanksgiving holidays ever since, I make sure I’m with family and friends, and now and then I try to set a place at the table of my mind, for any little old lady or lone friend who might want to join us, for the second saddest thing I’ve ever seen is a happy family lustily enjoying a Thanksgiving feast together and forgetting for a moment about all those lone diners in all the cafeterias of the world who could use a glance and a smile

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(c) 2009 A.D. Jim Reed

HALLOWEEN IS NEVER OVER

Listen to Jim’s podcast:

http://jimreedbooks.com/mp3/scariest_stories1.mp3

or read his story below:

Once you’ve read the scariest books ever written, Halloween is never over, and you are never the same.

Now that the silly and frolicsome Day of the Living (the commercial free-for-all that Halloween has become) is done and gone, let’s contemplate some really scary stuff…the stuff that nightmares are made of.

The scariest book I ever read: CASTAWAY by James Gould Cozzens, published in 1934.

I don’t know why every teacher of literature, every writing instructor, isn’t assigning this book to students who are interested in really writing scary, writing well. This book leaves a lifetime impression and may even defy categorization. It could be called a horror story, though nothing really supernatural occurs. It could be called a dark fantasy, but there are no levitations or spells or exploding heads. It could be termed a remarkable work of avant-garde fiction, but nothing about it is pretentious. It might be a mystery, but it’s even hard to define what’s mysterious about it.

I won’t reveal more, because I want you to read it for yourself. Let’s just say it’s the story of a man trapped in a department store. Let’s just say it might be a re-telling of ROBINSON CRUSOE. Let’s just say it’s a survivalist tale, a morality tale.

Let’s just say it will stick with you.

The amazement of books such as this is that one short line can make you jump, can make your neck-hairs stand on end, can bring chills…

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So…here’s my list of the scariest books/stories ever written…and a tiny excerpt designed to make you cringe and read on…

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CASTAWAY by James Gould Cozzens

(“What he would do if he heard it, Mr. Lecky did not know. In despairing anticipation he feared to hear as much as he feared not hearing anything. To be pursued and know it was hardly better than to be pursued and not know it…”)

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DRACULA by Bram Stoker

(“As the Count leaned over me and his hands touched me, I could not

repress a shudder…”)

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IT’S A GOOD LIFE by Jerome Bixby

(“Next day it snowed, and killed off half the crops–but it was a good

day.”)

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ROBINSON CRUSOE by Daniel Defoe

(“…my only way to go about an attempt for an escape was,

if possible, to get a savage into my possession…”)

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THE WAR OF THE WORLDS by H.G. Wells

(“And strangest of all is it to hold my wife’s hand again,

and to think that I have counted her, and that she has counted me, among the dead.”)

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I AM LEGEND by Richard Matheson

(“A coughing chuckle filled his throat.

He turned and leaned against the wall while he swallowed the pills.

Full circle, he thought while the final lethargy crept into his limbs.”)

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NIGHTMARE ALLEY by William Lindsay Gresham

(“How do you get to be a geek? I can’t understand how anybody can

get so low.”)

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OCTOBER GAME by Ray Bradbury

(“Then…some idiot turned on the lights.”)

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THE THIRTEEN CLOCKS by James Thurber

(“Even if you were the mighty Zorn of Zorna, you couldnot escape the fury of the Duke. He’ll slit you from your guggle to your zatch…”)

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–Jim Reed © 2009 A.D.