Contests!

    The chair is bouncy, built for both comfort and style, as my grandfather would settle for nothing less. My plate sits before me, not empty but, then again, this was my second helping of pie. We’d started the day by turning on the Thanksgiving Day Parade. Why we need a parade, why parades exist at all, I still don’t understand. We had done all of the normal Thanksgiving Day things: baked, cooked, fried, played pinball, watched- or pretended to watch- football, and wandered around my grandparents’ house, looking for dusty memories, left over from my mother’s, my uncle’s, my grandmother’s, my grandfather’s youths. Now the meal was over, the food making the transition from meal to leftovers that would probably turn into puppy treats after that. There was only one thing left to do. 

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We moved from the dining room to the kitchen and my brother, and I stood across from each other, the youngest members of the Jenkins, now Cardinal, family. My father rummaged about and produced the tradition. The wishbone. An unbalanced ‘Y,’ and when pulled apart, the child holding the small half wins a wish, the one gripping the big half a present. I was pretty sure that they’d made up the part about the present to avoid favoritism or petty fights, but it didn’t matter. It wasn’t really about that. 

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It was about the really weird ritual of pulling apart this particular, supposedly supernatural, bone. It was about family and love and the act of coming together. How that connection was made I’m not totally sure, but it’s there. As a culture, as a population, throughout the world there are traditions, holidays, places where time stops, and culture is molded and upheld. These things hold meaning, higher powers are seen, and requisites are attached but despite whether or not one believes, one acknowledges or respects those aspects a truth holds. Togetherness is vital. 

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These events are excuses or opportunities, depending on the perspective, to come together. We need our counterparts, our loved ones, our traditions to tie and knot and tangle our lives. Now more than ever, but for so long society has made life into a busy stream which leads to a vast sea that we would drown in if we didn’t make these holes, have these metaphorical tree limbs to cling to, these rest bits and energy sharing where we find each other and reassure one another of humanity’s good. There is a balance and these points, these opportunities are life giving. Thanksgiving reigns among them. A time without presents or requirements. Where one can say, “I want to see you,” without it being an excuse to fill a social imperative. We can hold one another and share our light, unfiltered. We can love. That is Thanksgiving.

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We pulled apart the wishbone.