Voltaire's advice at the end of Candide, his vicious satire of extreme optimism ("this is the best of all possible worlds"), is to hunker down and tend your own garden. More than one Zen master has suggested the same thing. Thanksgiving is the holiday when we traditionally give thanks for our personal and broader benefits, which is not a bad thing to do more often than once a year.
Our Thanksgiving will be small but nice. Nothing like the epicurean orgies of my youth ha ha but I doubt if I could survive those days. For a decade, from the late 60s to the late 70s, about half a dozen couples gathered on this holiday to celebrate friendship more than family, and I cherish those times. This continued even after some of us left L.A. The most memorable of the series for me was in San Jose, hosted by my soul brother Dick and his wife, we came down from Eugene, the rest came up from L.A., a motley group of close friends, white, black, Chinese, Hispanic, our own boisterous United Nations showing we all can get together and play music and eat and drink too much, a good time always had by all and a fat book of stories to remember as old farts like now.
So with this history, and having survived it, it isn't bad at all to sit back and have a small quiet turkeytime. H is doing this for her grandson, H with the largest heart I've ever seen. I'll help out as instructed.
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