This was one of the most unique Thanksgivings that we have ever celebrated. A brief shower blew in from the southwest this morning - I watched it approach the land on my iPhone's radar app - but it quickly moved out to be replaced by partial sunshine and a balmy 68-degree breeze. We spent much of the morning texting and calling all of our scattered loved ones and friends, and then I went for a two-mile run. I remembered all of the Turkey Trots that I have completed in the past on this day - far-flung places like Charleston and Orlando and Winston-Salem and Greensboro - so after a warmup mile out toward Fort Macon, I picked up the pace as if I was running a race, clocking an 11:13 mile, my fastest in some time. After I returned to the condo, Martha took a long walk on the beach.
These activities fell under the category of what my family, my Dad in particular, called "Working up an Appetite," which we always had to do on Thanksgiving morning. He was not a very athletic man in middle age, but he never failed to take my brother and me on a brisk one- or two -mile walk, and it always seemed to be a clear, cold, windy day. In retrospect I realize its purpose was not so much for working up an appetite - the aroma of turkey roasting in the oven had already done that - as to obey my Mom's instructions to get the boys out of the house. Martha and I talked about our Thanksgivings growing up and throughout the years together while we heated up our Thanksgiving dinner from Friendly Market, described in my previous post, which lived up to and even exceeded our expectations. Out the open sliding glass doors we could see and hear the ocean while we ate.
A large number of families have arrived here in the past day or two, gathering for this traditional holiday in houses next to us and here in the condo building. The CDC has urged everyone to stay home, so we hope that these gatherings, many of them multi-generational, do not contribute to the spread of Covid-19. At the house next to us, a family was setting up tables on an outside deck, which seems just a little safer. Children are everywhere, playing on the swings out on the lawn and running out the walkway to that siren call of the beach and its huge sandbox to play in and its chilly breaking waves. Three young boys played a game of football on the lawn, not just throwing the ball but hiking it and passing it off to a running back - very impressive, and reminiscent of football games sleepily followed on TV after dinner on Thanksgivings in the past. Two little shirtless brothers, perhaps eight and nine years old, one of them with an endearing Mohawk haircut (can you still get one of those?), ran out the walkway like pigeons released from their cage. They had more fun than I realized was possible spraying themselves with the hose on the walkway that adults sedately use to rinse sand from their shoes. Later I saw Mohawk out on the beach enthusiastically digging a deep hole in the sand while his brother filled bucket after bucket of water from the crashing surf.
After dinner, while we were watching all of this activity, one or two kites began to rise into the air just out from the condo, and then more and more of them, a veritable feast of kites taking to the air.
Some of them were dazzling, one of them circling and circling wildly, and then suddenly plummeting to the ground.
So this is what people do here at the beach for Thanksgiving, I realize. They eat dinner, of course, but then they go out to play, to fish, to fly kites, to gather shells. I strolled along myself after awhile, trying to socially-distance myself, saying "Happy Thanksgiving" to complete strangers. Surely this is the most American of holidays, from that possibly mythical day in 1621 when the Plymouth colonists and Wampanoag Native Americans sat down together, to Abraham Lincoln's proclamation in the midst of a civil war, to all of the memorable gatherings we celebrated when we were children.
I returned from my stroll on the beach and spotted Martha on the balcony, deep in her latest book. I, too, have begun a long book, and I intend to join her there as soon as I finish this post. So to the small handful of scattered followers of my blog, I wish you all a Happy Thanksgiving.
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