(T. S. Eliot, “The Waste Land”)
“Today is Thanksgiving Day,” I told myself this morning. As usual, I awoke at around 7, performed my ablutions, took my tablet off the charger and laid down again. I checked my emails, my Facebook messages and notifications, and I checked the weather in five different locations: Alpharetta, Georgia (where my niece lives and where it is mostly cloudy and 62 degrees), Denver (where my brother lives, clear and 33), Anchorage, Alaska (where my sister passed away, flurries and 35), New Gloucester, Maine (my future home, ice and 32), and, just to remind myself of where I am just now, a village on my island called CarayCaray (cloudy and 85).
By 8, I’m out of bed and in my sala tuning my TV to the BBC. I take my Centrum Silver vitamin, plus 800mg of ibuprofen for the pains that the US Army gave me. I drink a strong coffee. Everything just like any other day among the tinkling palms. In other words, I go through the motions of living. Even on Thanksgiving Day.
W. H. Auden, in his poem “In Memory of W. B. Yeats”, lamented that the death of a great poet means so little to the overwhelming majority of people that
A few thousand will think of this day/As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.
Doing something slightly unusual is the only way I could distinguish this day from every other. I can’t watch the Macy’s parade until 10 PM tonight, when it’s 9 AM in New York City. And the football games won’t be on until tomorrow morning. I can’t eat the traditional foods. Nobody raises turkeys (a bird native to North America) here. And I don’t have an oven to roast one in even if I had it. I could get barbecue chicken, or lechon manok, but it wouldn’t compensate for the lack of the genuine article. Besides, I would be enjoying my holiday repast alone, since Filipinos don’t celebrate today. It’s just an ordinary day to them.
So why do I bother to apostrophize this day? I could explain that it’s because I am a patriot who loves the country of his birth, the country of his parents’ birth. But that isn’t the real reason. The condition of living in a strange land, surrounded by foreigners can inspire an expat to try to blend in. But blending in isn’t feasible when you’re five foot ten, and on the hefty side, and as Caucasian as one can possibly be. It can also inspire an expat to go to the opposite extreme, to flaunt his foreignness, to become exaggeratedly American, to take exaggerated pride in his nationality. But calling undue attention to oneself is simply inviting disaster, since most of the natives are poor and they’re convinced that every American is a millionaire.
Mid-afternoon, I watched Planes, Trains and Automobiles until it was almost dark. I first saw it in April or May 1989 with a good friend in a theater just outside my barracks on Naval Air Station, Fallon, Nevada. Like everyone else seeing it for the first time, the ending caught me by surprise and off guard. I never expected to get choked up by a John Hughes movie. But every time I’ve seen it since has always been around Thanksgiving.
Watching it again today, for perhaps the twentieth time, as soon as the final ten minutes approached, when Del and Neal at last arrive in Chicago and Neal figures out Del’s secret – that he has neither a home nor a family, the film cast its spell over me again. That ending, the way it sneaks up on you out of nowhere, gets me every time. I always see myself as Del, never as Neal. Forever drifting, having no center, no north star to navigate by.
So here I am again, too many miles from where I used to think my home was located, among people who care about me but who have no means of helping me. I am thankful for them. I am thankful for my big brother and my niece, the last of my tribe. I am thankful for old friends. And for one in particular who has promised me a roof over my head when I manage, next year perhaps, to find my way to New Gloucester, Maine. And I’m especially thankful to the Social Security Administration for making it possible for me to retire at 62 and for providing me with a way forward, a light at the end of the tunnel. For too long I felt like I was in the tunnel at the end of the light.
Happy Thanksgiving.
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