Widow Alone on Thanksgiving

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving and I’ll be having a quiet day home alone with a roast beef in the crock pot. Boo hoo, the grocery store didn’t have any turkey legs but I did pick up some cranberries and a pumpkin pie. So there’s that to set Thanksgiving apart from a normal day and I’ll stay off Facebook until after the weekend. No sense torturing myself with photos of happy families celebrating. 

I had a two hour brunch with my Gathering Girls pals on Monday and I’m chalking that up as my day of thanks and gratitude. And why not. I am grateful for these friendships that came in my post-widowhood life. They might not be the kind of friends that I could call in the middle of the night and say, “I just killed someone” and they’d say, “We’ll be right over with shovels and a bucket of lime” but when I need comradery and lots of laughter I know it’s on tap twice a month. By the way, that was a joke about the murder and the lime. I’d never kill someone---I apologize to bugs when I wack them---and if I did I’d want my friends to help me go to the police and confess. And if you’re a friend reading this, please note that I’m not your go-to person for a shovel and a pail of lime in the middle of the night. No one is that good of a friend…past, present or future.

Since my husband died, this time of the year I’ve been over-dosing on Christmas movies on the Hallmark Channel. That’s sounds strange, I know, considering what I just said about staying off Facebook around the holidays. But watching fictional strangers celebrate is different. I can poke fun of them and their often under-researched storylines, the fake snow and the over-abundance of lonely and alone people and how every one of them magically finds love by Christmas Eve. But I watch the holiday films because they give me a sense of tradition when all the old traditions have slowly seeped out of my life in recent years.

One of my favorite movies to pick apart is based on a plot that involves a woman hired to decorate a house for the holidays and she’s worried about the fact that she only has two weeks to complete the job she’d already been working on for a week. When I was in the floral business I did those kinds of jobs for rich people, but my employer would have gone broke if I had taken that long to do them. What you don’t do is literally spend 9 to 5 every day for three weeks inside a house putting up bows, holly and tinsel while falling in love with the bachelor/home owner. Watching that movie year after year is my Rocky Horror Picture Show. I’m a cult fan of one.

And then there’s the movie based on emptying out the humane society for Christmas when most of those kind of places suspend adoptions over the holidays because it’s not a good time to introduce a new pet into a family. But my favorite nitpick to make in holiday movies is how often the characters walk around outside with no winter coat or in high heels when there's a foot of snow on the ground. The only people who do that in the Snow Belt are college kids who are rebelling against a lifetime of their mom’s yelling at them to come back inside and put on their coats or boots. Every time this topic of dressing for the season comes up a fellow blogger, who also lives in Michigan, comes along and shares/brags that she acts more like a 20-something than a 70-something and I’ll write back that even in the house I wear fingerless gloves and layers of clothing. I wouldn’t want to test the theory but I’m guessing if we were both stranded outside in a snowstorm---her coatless and me dressed for the weather---I’d probably be the one to die of exposure. Death doesn't follow any rules. Good men die and nasty ones get elected president.

Okay, let’s get down to the reason why we celebrate on the fourth Thursday of November. We all know that supposedly Thanksgiving evolved from a feast the Pilgrims had in October, 1621, to celebrate their first harvest in the New World. But it wasn’t until 1863 that the entire nation celebrated a fall harvest all on the same date and that came about because Lincoln proclaimed that “Evacuation Day” would become a national day of "Thanksgiving and Praise.” Prior to the Civil War, Evacuation Day was November 25^th and it commemorated the date when the British withdrew from The States ending the American Revolution. More tweaks happened over the years landing Thanksgiving on the 3^rd Thursday of the month. Yadda, yadda, yadda and now it’s a day when families watch the Macy's Parade on TV, then stuff themselves and and maybe go around the table so everyone can share what they are thankful for.

What am I thankful for? Lots of things including a home to shelter me and my might schnauzer, food for our bellies, money to pay our bills, extra money to donate to organizations helping with the wildfires out west, the election that put the House in control of the Democrats, and a world that---at the moment---is not hosting a nuclear war. Oh, and I'm thankful for Hallmark holiday movies because they remind me that love always wins in the end. ©

The Bachelor vs. Hallmark and their Snow Machine

I’ve officially overdosed of Hallmark holiday movies featuring people walking around in fake Hollywood snow. I sit inside my house wearing silk long underwear, a sweatshirt, quilted vest, sweatpants, leg warmers, wrist warmers, fingerless gloves and heavy socks while watching actors stand on sets with fake snow all around them and what are they wearing? No coats or other outdoor gear! I can hear my mom yelling, "Get back inside and dress for the weather unless you're trying to freeze to death!" Come on, people! They have cooling vests those actors could wear underneath winter jackets to keep their body temperatures in check on a warm sound stage but you don’t have them acting in pretend snow without proper coats unless their teeth are chattering and they’re looking for a cave where they can build a fire to thaw out their frozen limbs. This has been my first pet peeve of the year for the past five years now. At least I’m predictable and there’s value in that. Let’s say I was suspected of building bombs in my basement---which I’m not---being predictable helps the swat team to know when to storm their way in. Note to law enforcement: I can barely make it downstairs to do a weekly mouse check. If I was doing something illicit in the house---which I’m not---it would be in the garage.

It’s been so cold the furnace can’t keep up and I’ve been hearing cracking and popping sounds in the house but so far I haven’t figured out what’s making the sounds. No broken windows from the cold. No broken pipes but people all over the city are dealing with the latter. I’ve had a door freeze shut and my garage door opener didn’t want to work on New Year’s Day but I dealt with those issues without whining. No one can control the weather. But I am whining about a stupid choice I made tonight when I decided I’d had my fill of reading books back-to back and I kicked the dog out of my Laz-a-Boy so I could sit down to watch the first episode of this year’s The Bachelor. Can you believe that program is in its 22^nd season! I’ve watched an episode here and there in the past because so many people talk about the show but I’ve never followed an entire season. Crap! This may be the year I get hooked. And I shouldn’t admit that lest it tarnishes my image. I’ve picked my favorites to root for---Sweet Crystal and pixie haired Bekah---and I’ve read the rules for The Bachelor drinking game. Who knew they had one of those? I didn’t and in case you’re interested, if you played the game during the first episode you’ve have gotten way beyond legally drunk. The rules are simple; every time anyone mentions Arie (the bachelor) is race car driver, you gulp one down.

Arie also is a recycled loser from The Bachelorette show five seasons ago and he had a slob story about how he really wants to find love. Blab, blab, blab. Ya, like everyone knows if you line up 29 beautiful women for him to meet and greet in a “game show” his future wife is going to be one of them. (Insert eye rolling icon here.) He spent less than three minutes one-on-one with each girl and at the end of the night he’d kissed five or six women and sent nearly half of them packing, tears rolling down their some of their faces. The season’s villain has already been identified on fan sites as being Chelsea because she managed to get all the other girls to dislike her even before Arie gave her The First Impression rose. 

The show is so shallow it’s not funny but still it gets great ratings. I’m thinking it’s one of those things you love to mock. Well, at least I'm having fun doing it. And it’s got to be better than Married at First Sight. I’ve only seen previews of that show and please kill me if I ever get bored enough to watch a full episode. They’re in their sixth season and the premise of that show is two strangers must live together as husband and wife for eight weeks, then they decide if they'll stay together or get divorced. What kind of nut jobs would do that? What ever happened to the Bob Barker’s kind of game shows? Side note: Did you know he was raised on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota, an official member of the Sioux tribe? Google is amazing. 

Hallmark Movie Channel starts their Winterfest movies this weekend so I’ll probably still be whining about actors and fake snow before they move on to their Valentine’s Day fare. Those will be sweet, predictable movies that all end up being giant commercials for Kay Jewelers engagement rings. (Gotta love those corporate partnerships.) With our country so divided and the world a scary place right now with no end in sight, I don’t mind spending a little time using Hallmark movies as the backdrop for other things I do. You can only take so much crazy and with Hallmark you always have a happy ending. ©

Crystal is in the red dress, first row far left. Bekah (in lime green) is in the third row second in from the left and Chelsea is in the same row, forth in from the left. But I'm not getting hooked on this season, she says with a straight face.

Where Do I Go From Here?

“No more running. It’s you and me, that’s the way it’s going to be, and pretty soon you’ll see it’s you and me, that’s all there’ll ever be.” Jack Wagner of General Hospital and The Bold and the Beautiful fame wrote and sang those lyrics in The Wedding March, a 2016 Hallmark Channel movie. The storyline of the film reunites college sweethearts, twenty years after they parted, when a venue owned by Jack’s character is booked for his ex-girlfriend’s wedding to another man. Each has a teenaged daughter who helps engineer them back together. Do things like that happen in real life? If someone said to me, “Pretty soon you’ll see it’s you and me, that’s all there’ll ever be,” I’d worry that he’s a psychopath who’s going to lock me up naked and cold in an underground bunker. On the Lifetime Movie Network or in a James Patterson thriller that would be a logical next step.

But for a widow like me who has a predisposition toward melancholia during the month of April, hearing “...it’s you and me, that’s all there’ll ever be” so near my husband’s birthday was a queue to turn me into Sarah Sadness. This is all there’ll ever be. Yup, my time has passed. There’s no do-over to make me feel loved and needed again, no lost love out there to rekindle. That’s not exactly true. I had several serious romances before I met my husband but---jeez, I’ve evolved since my twenties and I can’t imagine in my wildest dreams ever being attracted to same people I was back then. And that, dear readers, is why movie plots like that in The Wedding March brings out the cynic in me. Thomas Wolfe got it right when he wrote, “You can’t go home again.” Did you know that title, that phrase was suggested to Wolfe by the widow of another writer? Ah, yes, another bit of useless trivia to clutter up our brains.

Since Mr. Wolfe used that iconic title it's become a metaphor or shorthand for stating that once we’ve moved forward into the more sophisticated world of adulthood with all its ups and downs, heartaches and headaches, joys and disappointments any attempt to relive our youthful memories will always fall flat and fail. Nothing ever stays the same and we all have to acknowledge that with a blending of sentimentality and longing or loathing---depending on what the world has brought into our lives or we left behind before our coming of age.

In Wolfe’s book is a passage that speaks to me as strong-but-aging woman and widow: “The human mind is a fearful instrument of adaptation, and in nothing is this more clearly shown than in its mysterious powers of resilience, self-protection, and self-healing. Unless an event completely shatters the order of one's life, the mind, if it has youth and health and time enough, accepts the inevitable and gets itself ready for the next happening like a grimly dutiful American tourist who, on arriving at a new town, looks around him, takes his bearings, and says, ‘Well, where do I go from here?’”

Where do I go from here? What widow has not asked that question of herself? What widow gets a clear road map in her head that answers that question? And when do we quit asking ‘where do I go from here?’ Thomas Wolfe had some wise words that could help: “Make your mistakes, take your chances, look silly, but keep on going. Don’t freeze up.” 

Not freezing up is the secret, isn’t it. Even if we have missteps after losing a spouse like me spending a year volunteering at small town museum only to learn it wasn’t a good fit for me. Even if I spent an entire summer looking at condos only to learn I’m not ready to pluck myself up from the known and plop myself down into the unknown. Even if I’m in a perpetual state of unrest. I may not know where I’m going but I’m moving forward, didn’t freeze up. I try a little of this, a little of that and I take away a better understanding of myself and the world around me. And sometimes in my search I leave behind a trail of crumbs in the dust in case I want to back-track to something that intrigues me more than another…like my copy of You Can’t Go Home Again. This is the fifth time I’ve written about Wolfe’s can’t-go-home adage in the five years I’ve been keeping this widow’s blog. This is the fifth April since I met Don in 1970 that we don’t get to celebrate our birthdays together. I don’t know what all this means in the grand scheme of things but if the past can be used to predict the future it’s a safe bet that I’ll be quoting Thomas again same time, next year.  ©