Except, they
didn’t. And two of those three descriptions are inexact at best—fashioned in
service to the opening line of what promises to be a joke but actually was our Thanksgiving.
The trio in
question didn’t walk into a bar, but, rather, into our house. (Although wine was served, I should note.) The
Spiritualist is Kathy, who in addition to being our longtime friend, computer fixer
and cat-sitter is a member of the Center for Spiritual Enlightenment in Falls
Church, Virginia, which is affiliated with the National Spiritualist
Association of Churches. The serialist is Joanne, a veterinary technician and Florence
Nightingale to animals who, though slightly north of 40, is in pop-cultural
terms one of the older teenagers around—a self-described geek about the Harry
Potter, Twilight, Hunger Games and Lord of the Rings franchises who proclaims,
to her husband’s helpless acceptance, that she would so “do” Joss Whedon, creator
of the long-running television series Buffy,
the Vampire Slayer, should events ever conspire to facilitate such intimacy.
The literalist is Trudy, an accountant by day who’s all about numbers on the
job but off the clock is all about friendship and compassion and a matchless
brand of charm that is awkwardly and uniquely her own.
Kathy, Joanne and
Trudy were our guests Thursday for a turkey-less Thanksgiving dinner (Trudy,
Lynn and Joanne being vegans, and Kathy and I vegetarians). It was pretty untraditional
in menu, guest list and conversation, but it met the holiday’s highest ideals
in terms of gratitude, warmth and community.
The afternoon
kicked off with Kathy and I conversing in the sunroom while the others convened
in the kitchen. Kathy’s quest for meaning and belonging in the world brought
her home a few years ago to a local church community led by an internationally
known and recognized Spiritualist medium. Communication with the corporeal dead
is commonplace within Kathy’s congregation, and the amazing, spot-on details of
those interactions cannot easily be explained away. On Thanksgiving, Kathy
shared with me Spirtualists’ belief not only in our eternal existence, but in constant
learning and growth beyond this life. She said Spiritualists believe that each
of us retains his or her individual identity after passing over, and that such earthly
pleasures as self-improvement, eating and sex continue in some form. (This leads
me to question whether our deeming a sinfully delicious dessert or particularly
memorable orgasm “other-worldly” isn’t, in fact, somewhat premature.)
During dinner, but fortunately
after most of the eating was done, a spirited roundtable conversation centered
on the subject of anal licking and cleaning among cats and dogs. Trudy started
it off by noting (appropriate of what, I can’t recall; Trudy tends not always to
require segues) that she lately has been wiping the ass that her hefty foster
cat is prevented by girth from reaching. Joanne—whose small Loudon County home
makes Noah’s Ark look like a near-empty rowboat by dint of its accumulation of permanent
and foster dogs, cats, chinchillas, rabbits, lizards, etc—chipped in by noting
that her own substantial kitty, Oreo, has a personal dispenser of Redi Wipes in
the form of Annie the Chihuahua’s tongue. (Which you therefore, Joanne further
noted, don’t really want licking your face despite the diminutive dog’s
abundant adorableness.) Kathy closed that particular discussion by toasting a
collective comfort level with the gross that made our focus on the feline anus
not only acceptable but enjoyable. (Damn, though, if Lynn and I didn’t fail to
mention our constant need, years ago, to yank hardened crumbs of shit off the
ass of our dim but heartrendingly sweet Manx, Franki. Next Thanksgiving, maybe.)
Then, after dinner,
it was Kathy’s turn to marvel, on our PC, at the aforementioned Joss Whedon’s
astoundingly articulate and well-reasoned, not to mention hilarious, YouTube
video, posted days before the presidential election and delivered deadpan, in
favor of a Mitt Romney presidency. His argument? That the resulting poverty,
chaos and class warfare would hasten the purifying zombie apocalypse that each
of us in his or her macabre heart of hearts (if not in our soon-to-be-eaten
brains) really would like to see. Weeks ago, Joanne had shared this video with
me, and I in turn had shared it with Lynn and several other ideological fellow
travelers. Kathy, who given further Spiritualist training may one day be able
to foresee and announce to the rest of us the approach of an actual zombie
apocalypse, nevertheless enjoyed Whedon’s frighteningly plausible outline for the
recent unrealized one.
During our
multi-hour gathering, there were no combustible family dynamics for us to gingerly
negotiate, no roiling political discussions to upset our digestive tracts, no rancorous
social-policy debates, no after-dinner self-segregation into football and
non-football camps. (Although I’ll concede that I did surreptitiously check the
scores a couple of times.) Granted, there was one friendly debate about whether
or not it’s stupid to spend $225 a ticket to see the ancient band The Who
perform the 1973 rock opera Quadrophenia
at the Verizon Center, with Lynn being squarely in the “yes” camp and Joanne
and I, who recently had attended that totally awesome show, begging
vociferously to differ. But given that any Thanksgiving table potentially
harbors a cornucopia of acrimony, that lone jibe scarcely amounted to a gourd
in the centerpiece.
Not that there’s
anything wrong with spending the Thanksgiving holiday with one’s for-real blood/legal
relatives. And not that each of us at the table on Thursday doesn’t love his or
her own mother and father and other relations, living and dead. They certainly were
in our thoughts. (And at times in our fond conversation, as when Lynn and I
told Trudy and Kathy how Joanne’s father once spent a good 15 or 20 minutes
relating to us “cute”— read “horribly embarrassing”—stories of Joanne’s youth
when she wasn’t there to shush him. Joanne’s face was roughly the hue of the
table’s cranberry sauce as we recounted that conversation.) At any rate, we
soon will again be in our respective families’ company, with the approach of Christmas.
But what it comes
down to is that there are many different types of families. Lynn and I derived
great joy from hosting three key members of our family of cherished friends
this Thanksgiving. We were sorry only that Joanne’s husband Eric, a teacher, artist
and author, couldn’t be with us because he literally was taking care of
business at a workshop in Canada—a nation that peevishly refuses to align its
own Thanksgiving Day with our own. Still, we felt deeply enriched by a communal
experience that was devoid of discomfort, abundant with laughter, and
unblemished by the dismembered presence of a bird slain for our supper.
And that, readers,
is no joke.
1 comment:
Pass the pie.
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