A Very Tender Turkey….

I imagine my sister on the other side of the continent writing this same story, if she hasn't already; it is really her story to tell, but I was there, and became part of the tradition, as all people who attended Thanksgiving at my mother's house for every year afterwards heard the phrase and was told the story, so it's kind of my story too.
My sister married a brilliant computer genius who also had an unfailing eye for foibles, animal and human.  a year or so later, my oldest brother married a very flashy, dramatic woman from the South Shore.  She came from first generation Italian immigrants who had wonderful Italian manners and customs, her father gave me a 5 dollar bill every time he saw me, I didn't know until I had lived in Italy that this was a common occurrence, and struck me as being amazing considering how my own family viewed the topic of cash.  [Something you never discussed or admitted to having or were willing to share].  John Biagi had run a restaurant in the North End of Boston for years, well attended by business men who worked more or less off the grid, he was not one of them [it was said] but knew how to keep his mouth shut.  He also knew whatever there was to know about food and hospitality.
My mother had spent some years learning the cuisine of her heritage, French, and was a confident cook, but a terrified hostess and in general suffered terrible anxiety about having people over for anything that didn't have to do with music.
The first Thanksgiving we all piled into her house to celebrate the increase of family fervor, The Biagis brought the turkey.  A very high quality turkey in the days when what you could get in rural NH was a Butterball, unless you happened to run over one.
Thanksgiving in our house always included a point of critical mass when someone took offense burst into tears or threw some kind of horror show, and mum was working very hard to see that it wasn't her, or anyone who reflected on her, so tension was high by the time we sat down to dinner.
"What a Tender Turkey!" my mother commented after a longer than acceptable silence.
"Oh, no, it was the way you cooked it!" returned Mr. Biagi.
"Oh, but really", mum answered "It was nothing I did, it a very Tender Turkey!"
>>silence<<
>>sounds of chewing<<
"Please pass the gravy?"  from someone
"Oh you don't need any gravy, this turkey is so tender!"
My brother in law began to suppress giggles.
People shifted in their chairs.
My mother wished she was still drinking, or perhaps, could just go to her room and read.
"Where did you find such a Tender Turkey?" she asked.
"Oh, I got from a friend in the North End, but really, it's just a turkey, the way you cooked it is what made it so tender…"  Mr Biagi answered.
"Oh, no!" she argued "This turkey is just SO TENDER!"
Well.
This is how family traditions start.  Thanks to my brother in law for embedding it forever
So on Thanksgiving this year, in memory of my long disappeared, never to be recovered family of origin, I am busily working to see that once again, we can claim to have the tenderest turkey ever.
Happy Thanksgiving to all.

suicide

Last winter was hard.  It was harder than I could have foreseen, and I determined to get some tools together to handle this one, but  there are no tools to forestall the effects of despair on people you love, and are attached to the positive outcomes of their process.  As someone who has danced with depression off and on for all of my life, I feel, that having made it this far, whatever it ends up looking like, I will probably make it the rest of the way.
At 93, my mother killed herself, and though I understand all the reasons she had for doing that, it wasn't the first time she had  gone towards death at her own hand.  When I was about 16 months old, she overdosed and was taken away, not to be seen again for a couple of months, a long time to a toddler with an unsupervised and angry older family orbiting the event.  Again, when I was 11, this time she was gone for longer, and I went to live with a father I didn't know very well, and who had no idea how to handle kids who had experienced trauma other than to insist that we get it together and follow the rules; Victorian rules that he never set aside for any reason.
An old friend, estranged, that my daughter was friends with died this summer, and it was ruled a suicide, though I don't for a moment believe it was, she left behind a toddler and a devastated , family, friends and community.
So to hear someone who is of absolute value to me speak of doing the same is beyond what I am equipped to bear.  I can't help, I can't make the pain go away, I can't solve the problems that cause this at the deepest level and I can't do anything about the transitory stimuli.  How in the face of this do I recognize that all things change, that life can bring astonishing resolutions, that healing can occur when I live in a state of fear that I am not allowed to express, when I have opinions that I cannot voice and when my own feelings which are tearing up my immune system have no place and no time for expression or resolution.
I know how much I have to be grateful for.  I know how tenuous the web is that holds me, that with the loss of a couple of strands I would fall through into a new, unknown and unwelcome reality.  How does anyone make another person see this other than tying them to a chair and forcing them to watch CNN for a few hours?
It is hard to sit with this.
Compared to what is going on in the world, the people who are murdered without being heard, the destruction of the only planet we have to live on [despite the science fiction movies that seem to think we can somehow find another one] the random hatred and violence that has no solution, the corruption of leadership, the poverty of spirit, it could be viewed as small potatoes, first world problems.
In the practice of Maitri, joining to the suffering world, knowing one is not alone in anything that is going on, all works so well when it isn't affecting one's personal "special" relationships.  I am not in the least convinced that I have the consciousness to navigate a lesson this intense.
Here is winter again, and I know that even if I had the money to run away, I could not.  I am standing in the fire.  Wave to me. 

Savour

Last week on FB, I took issue with the lyrics of a song and a friend of a friend asked me [ in a non aggressive manner ] if I was bitter.  I have been thinking about it ever since, because, of course, nobody has the goal of being bitter, or of being caught being bitter.
The issue was a song of Dolly Parton's, a song from a long time ago, a big hit, "Jolene".  When I first heard it in my teens, when I was a very romantic, hopeful girl, I thought it was a whiny song, and missed the point, that if one is in reciprocal love with someone, another female, no matter how alluring can't just swoop in and "take" a person away as though they were an object in a store.  As I have later found, it is possible to interfere with an established relationship by promising novelty, romance or just a bit of strange.  I have also discovered, at least in my experience, and that of my friends, that the loser in these transactions tends to be the woman.  If she's the one who is on the outside, she gets a man who she can never trust.  If she's on the inside, she loses most of their shared friends and community experience when he takes off.  If it's the man who is left, well, I don't see many of them hanging around single for long.
I don't see myself as bitter, but it is a feeling that is there sometimes.
I want to relate it to food, to the receptors on our tongues, the organ of speech, of pleasure, and being able to distinguish food from poison.  Sweet, sour, salt and bitter, but in the U.S. bitter is a flavor we don't seek.  Bitter foods are good for digestion, is it too far to leap to bitter experiences being an aid to understanding?  Too much of any flavor is distressing after hunger or a craving have been satisfied.
Clinging to a preference or an outcome seems to me not that different from having a narrow diet, preferring to salt everything, to bail in the chocolate, to avoid vegetables.
Having thought of this, it is true that I eat too much sugar, and I avoid the anticipation of pain,  I pick radicchio out of my salad and I take to my bed when drained by an unpleasant encounter.  So, yes, probably, bitter sometimes, but not embittered.

Success

On what does the idea of success depend?  First the word depend, meaning to hang off of, not to be built upon, but having come to mean being determined by. So from what does an idea of success depend?  It would seem to be a subjective value, a perceived location, based on an abstract concept, the achievement of an aim or goal, so it might come down to an examination of the source of goals.  The locus of such a source is still not a fixed point.  The laziness of the mind in working this one out is understandable when there are so many small goals that have to be achieved, like getting the laundry done and folded and put away, seeing that there is food in the house, gas in the car, cash for the taxes and other inescapable bills.  How is there time when life is on a runaway train to falling to pieces to consider such a thing as a goal that sits on top of Maslow's pyramid?
I've been wondering if a personal prime directive gets bolted into place so early that it is the work of a life time to figure out where it is, and changing the orientation is another task, and perhaps for me by now, best saved for another life if there is one.  If there isn't, then I'd better get busy making peace with the way things are, to accept what I can and cannot do, what I do and do not want and dig through another level of knowing that I have spent much of my time here trying to appease ghosts.
There is a danger of becoming disconnected from humanity at large by just considering things like not being around groups of people because it makes me feel as though a layer of skin is missing.  It is hazardous to sink into the sweet softness of my life in the woods, taking what insulation I can find in solitude.  It could lead to permanent sweatpants and coffee stains on my shirt.  It could lead to becoming the kind of old woman I viewed with derision and fear in my youth.  Somewhere on the razor's edge between these two realities is a path to peace, but I'm not sure it includes polite dishonesty.