Notes from my Knapsack 11-26-20

Notes from my Knapsack 11-26-20

Jeff Gill

Who's pardoning whom?
___

While the dateline for these columns tends to be a Thursday, whether you read these in print or online, the odds are that you won't be reading this on Thanksgiving Day. If you are, Happy Thanksgiving!

It's a mess. Let's just be honest and candid and accepting. With the growing spread of new COVID cases, and the mix of good news about vaccines and the awkward news of what kind of contacts lead to people coming down with the coronavirus, we all are having to make adjustments in Thanksgiving this year. Some bigger than others.

Every year, no matter your own personal situation, each of us has a store of memories, many delightful and always a few awkward and painful ones, about what Thanksgiving has been before in our lives, and how this year's observance will be different. Empty chairs around the table is a metaphor, since we rarely leave a chair empty, but in many homes a standard table will simply not have enough people physically present to fill them. So for many of us, for the first time perhaps, we literally will have empty chairs at the table.

Having a person or two ailing at the holidays isn't actually unusual, it's just that we all do, this year. We all have to deal with a different sort of celebration, and that general adjustment is a way of dealing with it, knowing that we are none of us alone in having a strange Thanksgiving.

Which is why I turn to the turkey. Most years, the United States of America has a deeply weird tradition at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and no, I don't mean anything to do with the election. I'm talking about the presidential turkey pardon. This year, a turkey farmer from Iowa will bring two birds to the White House, and the President of the United States will use his awesome executive branch powers to pardon one, and not the other. But, for decades at least, both end up at some petting zoo or agri-tourism farm as curiosities for the rest of their natural days.

My vegan friends have an obvious solution to this oddity. Don't eat any turkeys. Or Cornish game hens. Or chicken breasts. Et cetera. I'm not a vegan or even much of a vegetable aficionado, except for roasted Brussel sprouts this time of year, but this is where being a carnivore does make me think.

Turkey farmers are in a bit of a pickle, as suddenly people all want smaller birds, and those proud 14 and 15 and 19 pound birds in the freezer are getting shoved aside as people look to cook smaller this year. Will many be spared this year? The internet tells me wild turkeys live 3-5 years in the wild, and 10 or so years is the most they can expect as domesticated farm residents. So there's room for some deferred decisions here. Perhaps next year there will be a turkey surplus, and many commuted sentences will be executed as we rejoice at being together in larger quantities? So good news for us will be bad news for turkeys, just as our bad news this year I suspect will turn out to be good news for quite a few big birds down on the farm.

Perhaps the only good answer here is to at least be thankful for the life of the bird or bird parts or large root vegetables at the heart of our holiday table, to appreciate the sun and rain and struggles that got that food to us, and in it all, to give thanks.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's roasting a turkey breast this year, not a whole bird. Tell him about your Thanksgiving adjustments this year at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.