A Thanksgiving Like No Other

My family was also quite impacted by the lockdown. Dad pushed for an in-person Thanksgiving like you wouldn’t believe, with my grandma, aunt, uncle, and cousin (who brought along his own girlfriend as well.) Needless to say, it didn’t come to pass. My uncle was diagnosed with epilepsy earlier this year, and got too sick to travel- if that wasn’t enough, Bill de Blasio put a hold on any and all travel going to New York, so we couldn’t travel to visit them anyway. And, just to twist the knife even further, my grandma’s residence prohibited any and all visitors.

Needless to say, I was pretty bummed about this.

As a kid, I have fond memories of going out to celebrate Thanksgiving with my grandma, grandpa, aunt, uncle, and cousin. We would get a delicious meal (Grandpa always got the tail of the turkey, natch) and I would occasionally play games with him afterward. With this “Zoom” Thanksgiving, a lot of things that made Thanksgiving fun and special are omitted. There’ll be no exciting car trips (except the ones to my sister’s school), no face-to-face interaction with all my relatives, no going out to eat at fun restaurants. There wasn’t even the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade on TV- even that went virtual. As someone who loves to travel and hates being alone, this is all pretty hard for me. Oh, Dad was able to create a pretty good Thanksgiving dinner, but it just isn’t the same without all my fun relatives.

There is, however, one silver lining to this situation- I now have a lease on how great my aunt’s sense of family is. My dad’s relatives aren’t exactly perfect, stay together under all circumstances- that’s why my aunt helped out with the “Zoom” thing for Thanksgiving. She also did it for Passover and Rosh Hashanah earlier this year, even though we couldn’t be together as the virus was more serious back then.

Judaism has a strong sense of family, which is one of the many reasons why my mother is working on converting. She wants to become closer to my father as well, whom she loves dearly. After getting diagnosed with cancer, she wanted to know of a higher meaning in life. She wanted to believe.

Even my own sense of family was made stronger this Thanksgiving. I was concerned about my younger sister coming home for Thanksgiving, because she lives across borders and trying to get a COVID test was like pulling teeth. And of course, we couldn’t bring her back to her school until it was ready, so we kept her around an extra day. But the day we got the results, which were negative, we took her back that Sunday. Considering what a handful she can be sometimes, you wouldn’t BELIEVE how relieved we were.

However, during the trip, she did something really cool. She had taken my copy of The Velocipastor to carry around with her other stuff. But, instead of getting upset or angry, I just got a little surprised. When I asked her why she taken the DVD, she said “Dinosaur!” saying that she wanted to watch it because it had a dinosaur on the cover, and to her, that looked pretty cool. I tried to get her to answer more questions about “Why” she wanted to watch the DVD, but she couldn’t have been bothered to talk. She’s funny like that.

For the final night she was there, we had planned to watch Yesterday– she’s a pretty big Beatles fan, natch- which I had rented from the local library. Unfortunately, she couldn’t have been bothered to join us, because she had already seen it earlier on her DVD player. Naturally, this upset me, until I realized “why” she didn’t join us- why bother seeing a movie that she had already seen earlier? Next time she comes home, we’re planning to watch the Velocipastor with her, sister to sister. Knowing that there is a way to help her join us for the movies does make me feel better about this.

Speaking of which, I’m actually planning to give her The Velocipastor as a Christmas present. She was pretty insistent on taking it because of the cool dinosaur on the cover, but I gave her a lesson on not taking things that weren’t her’s- right now we’re keeping it at home, but if she’s really interested, though, we could watch it the next time she comes over. She agreed, and now we have something fun to look forward to. We also had to remind her that we were only renting the Yesterday DVD- it was not hers to keep!

In life, you can’t expect everything to go as planned. I know all too well with this whole COVID thing. However, we also need to find sunny spots in negative things, as i found here. You never know what gems you can find in life- you just have to be on the lookout for them.