76–A last Thanksgiving at home.
Driving in, I had the thought: "how many more Thanksgivings will we spend like this, a family together in our family home?"
Over the next few months, I’ll be sharing poems from a collection (tentatively entitled “Slow Business”) which I plan to publish in August. Here, I’ll provide short introductions. I’ll let you know more about the collection as it comes together. For now, know that the poems relate to the regularly scheduled programming, but come from their own creative cycle. Enjoy! - JR
In 2016, I went home for Thanksgiving.
That had been the tradition. As my grandparents had aged and travel had become more complicated for them, we’d moved from congregating in the Bay, where a large network of my mother’s side had settled, to gathering at our house in Irvine. After they passed, people came, though not from as far, and not as many. Yet every year we came together, filled the house with our voices, and waited for the home cooked turkey and her fixings to arrive on the kitchen table, the fulcrum around which this annual reunion turned.
In 2016, I went home and it was busy and bustling and tense. As it had always been.
My father had recently (abruptly) retired, and he had both turned his attention fully to making art (the living room had been converted into his studio), and (always restless, always hungry) was already talking about the next job, the next enterprise, the next project he could pitch. My mother had begun to talk about moving to Ohio – where my sister and her family lived. It was just a hazy urge, nothing concrete, nothing near a “plan:” maybe we’ll build a house, maybe we’ll buy a farm, but wouldn’t it be nice to be near the grandkids as they grow…
I was teaching and came to stay for the week. Driving in, I had the thought: how many more Thanksgivings will we spend like this, a family together in our family home. I did the math: maybe two or three. Maybe five if we were lucky and Ohio failed to lure them away. There was sadness to that. But it was a tentative, measured sadness. It wasn’t yet a deep-throated grief.
Two months later, my father received his diagnosis. Seven months later the house was sold and my parents were in Ohio. Two years later, he was dead. There would be no more Thanksgiving celebrations at home in Irvine. There would be no more Thanksgivings as a complete family.
Sometimes we experience a knowing without actually knowing. Sometimes foreshadowing – which only makes sense later in the book – appears as intuition in our bones.
This was one such time.
Parking at Ralph’s
Perhaps the exact moment
the tumor birthed itself
in the soft tissue of your brain
we were trying to park in the crowded
Ralph’s parking lot
on Thanksgiving Day, pushed
from the house by a stressed auntie
requesting twine to string the bird,
circling, circling, and then
kissing with our passenger mirror
that other mirror.
Your expression fixed
when the owner of the car
lunged forward to diminish us:
just go, you said, just go
like some whimpering dog
microseconds before the earth
quakes. (I had asked my journal
the night before: “When does a child
become caretaker to a parent?”).
Pops, is that why you let me drive?
Because you never let me drive.
Not even home from the DMV
the day I passed the driver’s test.
Onward,
Joey
