Thanksgiving

Looks like we'll be having Thanksgiving dinner with a friend of H's, a small gathering. Fine by me.

Thanksgiving used to be my favorite holiday. As a young man, through most of the 60s and 70s, I gathered with the same half-a-dozen couples to spend a long weekend together, highlighted by the Thanksgiving meal. Most of us were folk musicians, and we'd make a ton of music. We'd eat and drink to excess. We'd laugh a hell of a lot. This was a great time of my life, and the tradition continued even after I moved from L.A., where it all started, to Oregon for graduate school. I have a dozen stories I could tell from those gatherings.

After I moved east, and especially after the breakup of my marriage shortly thereafter, the one I thought was a keeper, I moved back to Oregon alone and Thanksgiving no longer was such a big deal. The tradition for me had ended, although the L.A. crowd still keeps it going and from time to time I've gone down, though always feeling like an outside guest rather than one recapturing the earlier magic.

H and I seem to leave the holiday to fate. Sometimes we're invited somewhere, sometimes we go out to a restaurant, sometimes we host a meal here. There's no real tradition involved. The older I get, the more I miss traditions.

Indeed, there are precious few traditions left in my life and most of them are solitary. H and I have a few, thank the gods, but the ones that were so important to me years ago have ended. It's too bad but change is the name of the game.