Calories and Pain

About a week ago, a week early by the calendar, Meals-on-Wheels brought a Thanksgiving dinner to my father's house. Turkey, cranberries, and three pieces of Saran-Wrap covered pumpkin pie. It had been a long and sad day and my father insisted that I eat something. I did not want to but started into a piece of pie to placate him.

I think of pumpkin pie as a most reliable dish, the Toyota Corolla of holiday food. As long as there is some kind of creamy, pumpkin-like delivery substrate, the cloves and nutmeg and whatever other spices come from the “pumpkin spice” container do the heavy lifting. I was explaining this to my father, because he had asked if the pie was good and I had said yes and no, and he had started to chuckle. The long, sad day had been preceded by another just like it and we had not had much to joke about. “That's so perfect,” he said, “that's just the kind of thing you would say. It's not good but it's good for being not good. That's so Josh.” His chuckle became a laugh, a slap of the knee, and then wiping tears from his eyes.

I'm not really sure what he meant, but I laughed just to laugh with him. My step-mother was in the hospital with three-quarters of an inch of blood on her brain, my father's oxygen machine whirred in the next room, and I was still loaded on morphine from my own visit to the emergency room. None of us had any money for food or gas or fulfilling our prescriptions. Each day we awoke, attended to whomever was in the worst shape, and my father and I returned home telling one another we didn't need anything to eat anyway.

That was my Thanksgiving for this year, calendar be damned. I am not in the mood for counting blessings, not that I don't have a great many. I don't care to wrap anything into a metaphor, though they do come to mind. I awake each day and say here comes another one. It is not a matter of feeling good or not good, it is a state of suspended agency, of worn out fight-or-flight response, of the eternal scrambling of poverty.

I don't care if it this means anything to anyone or not, I just want to remember it as I remember last year. I see myself, then, rain-soaked and smelling of sagebrush, tromping through the redwood forest with a shotgun. I was hunting quail, alone but not lonely, soaking in the wet and spice and riotous wind of the mountain top. I gathered nothing to eat for dinner, but in the evening a rare owl came to hoot with me in the gloaming.

It was enough, that day. Enough for me.