Another Day in the Country
A Thanksgiving awareness
© Another Day in the Country
While I was on vacation down in Mexico, I read a book titled “There, There” by a Native American writer.
It sorta ruined Thanksgiving for me with all the little stories of the original people here being so kind to newbies from another continent when they were starving to death.
We all like that story, and it is a good one about thankfulness and generosity, gratefulness and gratitude.
Unfortunately, it isn’t the whole story. There’s always another side to any story that we tell, and we have to be wise enough to realize this fact.
In fact, since we are mentioning facts, the rest of the story is like “Despicable Me” because the leaders of our brand-new country were really the opposite of all those nice warm, kind words, and actually awful, mean, cruel, selfish, and every other unknowing sin you’d like to mention, trying to get rid of the Indians.
It’s like “sorry to bring this up,” but there really is an ugly side to Thanksgiving that’s way bigger in importance than our overeating and arguing with our relatives.
I know I’m sounding really snarky, but I’m working something through.
I really want to enjoy Thanksgiving, but I’m smarter now than I was a couple of weeks ago because I read this book and walked in someone else’s shoes for more than a mile.
This book wasn’t about famous Indians, long dead. It’s about Indians growing up in Oakland, California, which is a place I know something about.
“So, Baba, what did you think of the book?” my grandson asked.
“It was depressing,” I said.
Later, he texted me and said, “My English teacher has a bulletin board with the covers with all of his favorite books on it. Guess what’s there? ‘There, There’!”
And how did I happen to be reading this book?
The answer has to do with the kind of friends I have. They are always reading books. It’s one of the things we have in common.
Gary, especially, loves turning people on to new books. He rather prides himself, I think, in being able to choose just the right book to put in their path.
He’s been a professor for years. In fact, if you watch that new Netflix show about an older guy, played by Ted Danson, who answers an ad and finds himself doing detective work in a retirement center, you get a glimpse of my friend Gary.
He has a head full of stories, is a sharp dresser and a witty storyteller and just applied (at 85) for a part-time job in a museum.
I didn’t bring any books on my trip. That’s a new wrinkle for me. A bag full of books from the library still sits beside my bed, and I suppose I could have taken one of those, but I didn’t.
“No books, Pat,” I told myself. “Just enjoy being with your friends.
Well, I’d hardly landed, sitting on the cement outside of the airport in Cancun, before I was wishing I had a book to read to while away the time until my friends showed up in a taxi.
Norma, the other half of this combo, also is a reader. She was reading a story about nurses who served in Vietnam. That’s a really good book — but, it could be very depressing, too.
I’d listened to that book on audio and really enjoyed it, even though the subject matter is horrific.
There are some horrible things we need to pay attention to, don’t you think? I’m sure you could name about four of them right off the cuff with war, greediness, and enslavement being at the top of the list.
Gary threw a couple of books in his suitcase and put them on a table in a room where I was sleeping.
I read both during the week I was there, sitting in the sun by a perfectly blue pool of water, sipping a virgin pina colada. Pretty perfect: good friends, perfect weather, icy spicy drink and a good book. Something to be really thankful for this time of year, this time of my life.
As I was leaving, I asked, “Gar, have you already read these books?”
“Quite awhile back,” he grinned.
“And you brought them for me?”
“Looks like it,” he chuckled, “You liked them, didn’t you? I thought you would.”
He confessed he’d gone into his shelf of favorite books and picked out two and some magazines (forgetting, or maybe remembering, that I was the one who sent him that subscription a year or two ago) that he wanted to share with a friend on another day in a really far away, foreign country.