The Spirit of Thanksgiving… In the Garage
November 25, 2000
I saw it all happen in super slow-mo. The old woman, who looked like she could be the poster lady for sweet, all-American grandmothers, turned her ankle on the curb and fell hard onto the pavement in front of the supermarket. She was on her way out of the store, carrying two brown paper sacks full of Thanksgiving groceries when she crashed to earth with a sickening thud that I won’t soon forget the sound of. I was only a few feet away but couldn’t get the words out of my mouth quick enough.
Watch out for the….curb!
I rushed over to see if she was okay. The grandma seemed a bit dazed and her ankle was already swelling up, so I instructed her to just sit there for a minute and rest while I began picking up her groceries. As I scrambled to salvage what I could of her food, a tremendous blast nearly knocked me off my feet. I spun around to see a grim-faced, gray-haired man in his mid 40’s, laying, very impatiently, on the horn of his truck, his bumper not three feet from the old lady’s head. I couldn’t believe the nerve of the guy, and just as I was going over to tell him to take it easy, grandma got up, dusted herself off, straightened her powder-blue cardigan and gathered her belongings. She then walked over to the driver’s side window of the truck, thrust her fist within an inch of the guy’s nose and slowly, dramatically, raised her middle finger and then turned and hobbled slowly away.
I don’t know, do the holidays seem to have lost something? Has the meaning of it all gotten completely skewed? Or am I just getting more cynical in my older age? Geeze, you’ve got psycho drivers out there, old ladies flipping people the bird, Christmas displays before Halloween, people rushing around like lunatics…in general, the holidays seem a lot more like chaos these days than anything else.
As I drove home from the grocery store, I started thinking about the true meaning of Thanksgiving and wondered if I’d ever be able to find it again. I thought maybe reading some on-line articles that recounted the history of the holiday would help, but I felt uninspired by them. I even wandered into a Thanksgiving chat room, but was quickly turned off by the clueless morons in there arguing about the best stuffing recipes. I started to feel depressed. What kind of guy can’t get excited about Thanksgiving?
Well, I continued to feel blue all the way up until turkey day. On that Thursday, we arrived in the early afternoon at my parent’s home, the very place in which many youthful Thanksgivings past had been so sweet. Seeing family and smelling the heavenly aromas of roasting bird and pumpkin pie did my spirit some good, but I just couldn’t shake the bad feelings I was having about it all. Even watching a little football, normally a good tonic for such ailments, didn’t much change my mood. Feeling sour, I went out to the garage so nobody would sense my bah-humbug attitude.
Out there, I sifted through an old box of school books I had left after my return from college and next took a spin on the ancient exercise bike that had been purchased so many years ago with the best of intentions, yet had lived most of its life as an impromptu coat rack. On a bit of a nostalgic trip, I began to explore the darkest corner of the garage, a place not visited by humans in years, but home to a bustling cobweb community of daddy long legs spiders. There, almost hidden by its protective coating of dust, I spied my first ever fly rod, a long-forgotten, golden brown, 8 1/2-foot fiberglass Cortland 7-weight. Attached to the end of the heavily-worn cork handle was the matching reel, its original red paint job faded now to a pinkish hue, not unlike the rosy cheeks of the first ever rainbow trout I caught with it way back when.
With my attitude much improved after my discovery, I dusted off the rig and strung the old and cracked tan-colored fly line up through the rod’s eyelets. I yanked on the end of the line and the elderly rod sprang to life and a million memories came rushing back. Rainbows flashing, largemouth splashing and hundreds of farmpond bluegills in between. Yes, this ol’ boy and I had cut our teeth together and I almost felt embarrassed to have ever retired it in favor of some fancy, light weight, high modulus, jet black, cost more than your first car graphite model. The old Cortland and I had quite a past together, and as I recalled some of our greatest hits, I got the idea that I should take it down to the stream behind the house and make a few casts. Just for old time’s sake. About halfway down to the creek, however, I had a change of heart. I realized that I could never duplicate the experiences I’d had with the rod in my youth and didn’t want to do anything to dilute those images. So, I silently thanked it for all the memories and put it back in its corner of the garage.
Something about the encounter changed my whole perspective and I felt one-hundred percent better about things. I guess I just needed to take a trip back to a time when my life was so much more simple, when there were no deadlines, no bills, no rush-hour traffic hassles and definitely no losers who try to run over injured grandmas in parking lots. On the journey, I realized what’s really important in life and I also got reacquainted with the little things that make up the spirit of Thanksgiving.
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