Thankful For The Old And The New

Today I'm feeling a little sad.  My friend Mildred, with whom I have spent the past few Thanksgivings, was going to have her Thanksgiving dinner today.  She called earlier; I could tell she wasn't up to it.  "I want to have you over again soon, with Joanne", a mutual friend of ours.  I'm sure she will.  Maybe I'll host something for them.  

Millie's husband, John, hasn't been well.  So it wasn't a surprise she sounded so tired when she called.  Still, it's hard not to feel as I do now:  They are the best friends I've had in a long, long time.

On the other hand, I had a great time yesterday with some new friends.  I met Suzanne and Deborah at a church I began to attend in March.  They live a few neighborhoods away, in Queens.  Suzanne was raised Catholic, as I was, but Deborah is Jewish.  Still, she attends the church:  From what she tells me, she observes the traditions and treasures the culture she inherited, but likes the inclusiveness of the church we attend.  

It just happens that Hanukkah began on Thanksgiving Day. So Suzanne and Deborah combined the celebrations.  It never would have occurred to me to have borscht and latkes with a turkey dinner.  Then again, I wasn't surprised to learn that they actually go well together.  After all, the borscht--which Suzanne and Deborah made from scratch, as they did with everything else they served--is a soup of beets and cabbage, and latkes are, as everyone knows, potato pancakes.  So of course they go with cranberries, pumpkin and corn.  

And the people seemed to mix even more easily.  Suzanne's nonagenarian father, her brother and friends--and those of Debroah's--shared food and conversation with us, and two other people from the church.

All right, I know:  I waited a few months to say anything about church.  I guess I'm still wrapping my head around the idea that I go to one--volutarily, no less.  For a long time, I swore I would never attend any house of worship, or be part of any organized religion, ever again.  I kept that promise for a long time, even in the face of suggestions, prodding and outright pressure from various co-workers, friends and family members. 

I don't think I'll ever believe everything any church or other religious organization teaches.  But somehow it seems oddly right for me--at least, the one I've been attending.  I'm not one of those people who, in her old age, ponders her mortality and heads for the pews.  Actually, even when I didn't believe in any sort of supreme being--or, at least the ones I'd heard of--I knew myself to be spiritual.  In fact, I did my gender transition and reassignment surgery for spiritual reasons:  I am a female spirit; I wasn't merely a man who wanted to be a woman. (Most such men wouldn't even think of doing what I've done.)  And, I did a bit of church-surfing--without, of course, telling anyone what I was doing--before someone suggested I go to the one I've been attending:  St. Luke in the Fields, in Manhattan.

Here's another irony:  the person who suggested St. Luke's is one of the last people in the world I expected to do so.  He heard about it from a friend of his; he himself has never been a church-goer.  Well, I suppose that might be a lesson:  The spirit does not always proceed by logic, even if it makes perfect sense in the end.  I guess that's the reason why you can't solve questions of faith with science any more than you can solve questions of science with faith.

But I digress.  If nothing else, I am thankful that I have old friends and am making new ones, and finding, perhaps, a community.  That, I suspect, is more important than my beliefs (such as they are) align with those of other people or an institution.

For Thanksgiving

On this day, I am thankful that I've had the opportunity to live a life I'd envisioned for myself.  Some of the particulars aren't ones I'd planned.  But at least I got the opportunity to become the person I wanted to be.  Too many people, including ones I've known, have never had the opportunity.


I am grateful for myself, and hopeful for them.

The Day Before Thanksgiving

In the last moment of my life, I saw the day before Thanksgiving...


I'd just pedaled a few strokes around the virage; a bed of wildflowers turned, in an instant, into a glacial field.  The sun was so bright it turned into the kind of liquid haze through which dreams skip and float along with the words that make sense only in those dreams.


It was noon.  We were all lined up--the boys on one side, the girls on the other--to leave school for the day, the next day, and the three days that would follow.  For some reason, when I was a kid, that was always my favorite moment of the year.  Even the seemingly-capricious discipline of the Carmelite nuns who taught in our school could make that moment less happy.   They could cast a pall over the day before Christmas Eve, over Holy Thursday.   Whether or not they loaded us down with homework, they left us in such a mood that Christmas, even if we got the gifts we hoped for, seemed more like a truce, and Easter was just too holy of a day to really consider as a vacation, even if we were home for the week that followed.  


But noon on the day before Thanksgiving always seemed like the most carefree moment of the year.  In most years, it began the last interlude of Fall; the lights of Christmas only accented the darkness that consumed ever-larger parts of the days that would follow.  In that moment, on the day before Thanksgiving, one could still see the last flickerings of the autumnal blaze that burned green leaves into the colors of the sunset.  Somewhere along the way, they turned as yellow and, for a few days, as bright as the sunlight that filled the air around the mountain I was climbing on my bike.


It was just about noon; I would soon be at the peak of le Col du Galibier, one of the most famous climbs on the Tour de France.  From there, I would have a long effortless ride to the valley.  In the meantime, each pedal stroke would become more arduous.  I'd been pedaling all morning, but even more important was the altitude:  I was more than a mile and a half above sea level.  The air is thinner, and even though my breath steamed as I puffed up that mountain on that July morning, the sun burned through the layers of sun screen I'd lathered on my arms and face.  


Bells rang.  Dismissal?  Or the cows in the herd down the mountain?  I stopped for a drink and one of the crepes I'd packed into my bag.  I took a bite and a gulp.  


You're free.  I wasn't sure of whether I was hearing that.  Perhaps I was giddy from the thin mountain air.  Yes, you're free.  But I wasn't hearing it:  It was being told--or, more precisely, communicated--to that child who was being dismissed from school on the day before Thanksgiving.  You can go now.  What are they talking about?  Who's "they"?


You don't have to do this again.  I'd never heard that before, certainly not in those days.  What did that mean?  What won't I have to do again?  Climb this mountain?  Go to school?


Down the Col du Galibier, through the Val de Maurienne, as the eternal winter of that mountaintop turned into the hottest day of summer in the valley, my mind echoed.  What, exactly, wouldn't I have to do again?


Near the end of that day, I reached St. Jean de Maurienne, just a few kilometers from Italy.  There, I would see the stranger who, inadvertently, caused me to see that I could follow no other course but the one that my life has taken since then.  A year later, I would move out of the apartment I'd been sharing with Tammy; about a year after that, I would change my name and begin my treatments.

Giving Thanks on a Quick Morning Ride

I heard it was going to rain today.  So I tried to sneak in an early ride:  just a few miles on my fixed-gear bike.  It felt about ten degrees colder than it was when I pedaled home last night after teaching in the technical institute.  And yesterday was at least that much colder than the day before.  At least, it seemed that way, for the wind blew hard enough to strip nearly all of the remaining leaves from wizening branches. 

One of the things that amazes me about cycling is that, even after all of these years, I can ride down some street I've pedaled dozens of times before and a moment, an image, will imprint itself in my mind.  Just south of LaGuardia Airport, in East Elmhurst, an elderly black woman stepped, with dignity if not grace, from behind a door on which dark green paint bubbled and the wood splintered and cracked into ashen hues like the ones on her coat, which she expects, or at least hopes, wil get her through another winter.

She is probably thankful for even that.  You might say that I am, too, for being able to ride by and see that, and to be able to ride home, then to Millie's house for Thanksgiving dinner.

I hope yours was at least as good as mine.

Another Happy Thanksgiving

I'm writing, in part, to wish those of you who are reading this (and those who aren't!) a Happy Thanksgiving.

If you've been reading my blog, you know that I have many reasons to be thankful. The biggest one, is of course, that I've made it. I survived molestation, battering, decades of depression and self-loathing and all of the self destructive things I did--and I'm here now. I've managed to live long enough to live as a woman--and, of course, to have the surgery.

And now I've just shared a Thanksgiving dinner with Millie, John, their daughters Stephanie and Lisa, their son-in-law Tony, grandkids Melanie and Stephen and Millie's friend Catherine. Today's dinner marked the fifth Thanksgiving I've shared with them.

Now I have to go and continue packing for tomorrow's move. Hopefully, that will be a reason to give thanks, too.