Promises to keep

Nov. 25, 2010

Dear Adams family,

The Thanksgivings with you are memorable to me for the feeling of grace in the room more than anything else. At tables filled with your family and homesick friends, each one told of something we were thankful for. Mine was your family's willingness to take in lost souls like me.

So many people go wandering in the Southern California desert. Maybe adopting some of them came naturally to a family of 10.

Maybe this happens in Catholic families everywhere, but I was amazed when the priest from your church dropped by your house for pumpkin pie and coffee. He chatted with everyone like a member of the family, then left, no doubt with promises to keep and miles to go before he slept.

Afterward when the family dog-piled on the living room carpet, I longed to be on the bottom.

The temperature might have been 70 degrees, but to me the meaning of Thanksgiving was in your house.

My parents and I are in Cincinnati visiting my sister's family and my brother. DC, her parents and her brother are having their annual "American Gothic" Thanksgiving at the cabin on the Castor River.

In Cincinnati, where snow showers are predicted Thanksgiving Day, we'll go to a jazz club and watch football games on two big-screen TVs. One year we had a jam session. Our nieces' and nephew's friends, all in college or older now, will come and go.

On the river, where cell phones are useless, they'll work around the cabin, play dominoes and maybe watch an old movie. Our new dogs Buster and Dizzy will spend their first night at the cabin. How will they sleep when owls hoot and coyotes howl? How will anyone?

DC and I usually split up for the holidays. Something to do with miles and promises.

In Robert Frost's famous poem "Stopping by Wood on a Snowy Evening," the speaker pulls back on his horse's reins simply to watch the woods fill with snow on the darkest night of the year.

You picture a scene lit only by tiny lights dropping from the heavens. You hear the stillness, the bells on the horse's harness, the wind and the falling down.

"The woods are lovely, dark and deep," Frost writes. We all know that awed feeling, of beholding the mystery.

We all have miles to go and promises to keep. But our faith resides in the woods.

Thanksgiving is a good time for simply stopping and watching. For remembering to be grateful and realizing that gratitude is an attitude. For tuning into the wonder that envelops us, is us and is the natural world. To recognize what it means that we are not apart but part of the dog pile.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a former reporter for the Southeast Missourian.