A THANKSGIVING PRAYER BY STEVE SIDDLE

A Thanksgiving Prayer  by Steve Siddle

There is a scene in the movie “Home for the Holidays” in which the great Charles Durney recites a prayer before Thanksgiving dinner. It goes:

“Dear Lord, we realize that lately everything is changing too damn fast and all sorts of things that are always the same, even things we hated like, shoveling the turkey and stuffing the snow and going through the same crap year in and year out…Even those old fashioned pain in the ass traditions like Thanksgiving – which really means something to us, even though God dammit we couldn’t tell you what it is – are starting to stop. And thousand  year old trees are falling over dead. And they shouldn’t. That’s all from this end. Amen.”

That pretty much captures my feelings about Autumn in Worcester Ma. I recently came home from living on the west coast and the most sensible question I avoid asking myself is: Why?

What was it in my blood that pulled me out of a practical oasis (weather wise, at least), pulled me back just before Winter. The latest answer I’ve come up with is; Autumn. It pulled me back.

Maybe its due in part to the fact I was born in October, but I’ve always felt some sort of “whole being” connection with the landscape, the smell of the Earth, the sound of the wind and the peculiar afternoon light. It is hard not to feel a little more alive with leaves falling brilliantly to their deaths at your feet.

It’s impossible to ignore, even in the midst of 50 degree weather and clear, bright sunshine, that winter is coming. The only reliable truth we know is that cold weather is approaching and sooner or later it will storm.  It could be this weekend.

It’s the not knowing what’s coming next that makes stoics of New Englanders. Don’t believe those who try to tell you scraping ice or shoveling snow or running low on Oil is what makes us tough. That shit just makes us miserable. It’s the being able to balance the possible hardships of a long winter before you with the unsurpassable beauty of the changing landscape. Keats called this crucial ability “Negative Capability”. “An imaginative stance that could bear strong competing strains of passion while maintaining disinterestedness.” (Bloom)

Less we all walk around like poets we have ancient autumnal rituals and tradition into which we privately assign some degree of spiritual meaning.

I like blowing leaves. I have a smoldering contempt for raking the yard yet I missed the short lasting thrill of standing in a big pile of leaves with a chill in the air and sweat on your back. This has been the first year of my life I used a leaf blower, and let me tell ya, it’s a whole new experience.

Palm tree leaves do fall, but they become the color of mud and lay curled up in gutter under a cloudless sky. One must be reminded that it is Autumn in California by Halloween decorations and football. You would never know by the weather. I missed that.

I  am damn well aware of the fact that just a few weeks from now, I’ll be cursing the cold and searching Orbitz for a one way ticket west. But for now, I’m loving it.

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving and I’ll be cooking all day and everybody in the kitchen will be in my way. But they’ll be funny and bring good food and wine and try to remember where we had Thanksgiving dinner last year, or the year Grampy died or the year the Red Sox won the World Series.

The heat from the fireplace and oven will make us open the door to the backyard. There on the deck railing will be cider, water and Champagne chilling in the cool air to make space in the fridge and every now and then I will step outside and remember why I came.