Those Thanksgivings Past

Well, another Thanksgiving has come and gone, increasingly overshadowed by Black Friday. After the gluttony, we endure the wretched excess in shopping malls.

Not that I’m overly cynical about this holiday season. For I’ve often written about it here, so often in fact that it’s hard now to further my quest for fresh rhetoric. So this time I decided to look back at some nice things in past columns for this paper.

As an appropriate Thanksgiving prayer, try these quoted sentiments (in a 2001 column): “Give us courage, gaiety, and a quiet mind. Spare to us our friends; soften to us our enemies. Bless us, if it may be, in all our innocent endeavors. If it may not be, give us the strength to endure that which is to come, that we may be brave in peril, constant in tribulation, temperate in wrath, and in all changes of fortune and down to the gates of death, loyal and loving to one another.”—Robert Lewis Stevenson.

On finding a great place where we retirees can eat out (2001): “We went to a neighborhood restaurant last night and it was terrific,” said the husband. Its name? He goes blank.

“Well, you’ve got to help me out. What’s the name of that flower that grows on a thick stem that has a lot of thorns on it?”

The other man says, “Rose.” “Rose, yeah, that’s it. And turning to his wife of 50 years, he says, “Rose, what was the name of that restaurant we went to last night?”—A favorite joke of the late Stephen Ambrose, the noted author of books on World War II and the Lewis and Clark expedition to explore the West.

Another favorite Thanksgiving theme of mine through the years: Too much food.

From a 1997 column, “If obesity contributes to 300,000 premature deaths a year in our prosperous country, as claimed, then surely a fitting epitaph in today’s graveyards would be Betcha Couldn’t Eat Just One!”

“For Thanksgiving has become our annual lavish tribute to nonstop gluttony, not an appreciation of bountiful harvests. Do you remember when this celebration was typically the biggest and best meal of the year?

“Not so today, thanks both to our own comparative prosperity in general and the fact that food expenditures take such a small share of our incomes. And…we are simply eating more food…

Moreover, “Who eats a traditional meal in the dining room anymore during football season? …As a matter of fact, I would hazard the guess that people wolf down more food on Super Bowl Sunday than on Thanksgiving.”

Anyhow, “’Like smoking, drug abuse and violence, obesity is a socially contagious disease. The more you have, the more you get. Evan taking genes into account, fat parents are more likely to have fat children,’…So wrote Michael Fumento, author of The Fat of the Land.” Yet, an important ingredient of Turkey Day is still the returning of thanks. Families gather to pray and to express their love for each other and their Almighty and to celebrate the good in each of us.

Who could better express these optimistic sentiments, as penned below by Ralph Waldo Emerson?

“To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because have lived. This to have succeeded..”--- Quoted from a 2003 column

Thanksgiving is also a time for memorializing and remembering old friends recently departed. In 2003, I mentioned neighbors John Manack and Frank Walter. Frank had been a pioneer Aquia Harbour home improvement specialist and John, earlier a P-40 pilot in North Africa in World War II, had marketed products and services to funeral homes.

“Both were gentlemen. We enjoyed many growing-old portions of mutual respect and reminiscences. Their last illnesses were mercifully brief.”

The same goes for more recent departures like Charlie Chaplin, a co-founder of our Stafford ROMEO club, and Bill Carpenter, a distinguished Navy commander and survivor of Pearl Harbor and an invaluable civic leader in Aquia Harbour’s early years.

By listing them, however, I risk being accused of forgetting others who perhaps hadn’t leaped to mind, like Randy Butler and Joyce Laenger and Janet O’Neal and Ken Cundiff and Kay Coulter, and of course, John Pfeiffer. Alas, the list continues to grow.

That’s a downside of aging: Having to bury your friends.

Finally, just as I concluded for Thanksgiving 2003, regarding the departed friends: “Here’s hoping we’ll someday get together again—but not real soon.”

Too much football?

Are you ready for some (more) football? I once was, and truth to tell, still am.

You’d think that, as a seasoned retiree I would have long outgrown such a game that younger guys still go bonkers over. After all, football is vastly overexposed on TV. A few national channels even carry “significant” high school games.

Yet, there I was one weekend this fall, wearing a new Redskins ball cap and sticking a new Texas Aggie decal on my car’s bumper. Alas, I shouldn’t have bothered, for both football teams obliged by quickly rolling over and playing dead.

The Redskins ball cap was bought to complete a personal ensemble. You see, my Yorkie pup Lollipop and I competed in Aquia Harbour’s first Octoberfest dog show, at our new Bark Park. She wore a Redskins sweater and I a Redskins jersey plus the ball cap. (She won third place in the beauty contest, by the way.)

Ridiculous? Of course. Isn’t this good-old, and I do mean OLD, boy way too long in the tooth for such football worship? Perhaps. I started out playing in junior high way back when the single wing offense was still in vogue. Ask your grandfather about that.

Then in high school, I finally lettered as a starting tackle in my senior year. In Texas that accomplishment was valued as highly as a masters degree. It was way back when no black kids were on our team—or in the school for that matter. And only sissies like me wore those ridiculed face masks that are required today. Now, blacks seem to dominate and excel, much as they have for many years in basketball.

Even so, football hasn’t changed all that much. Someone once claimed that football remains so uniquely fascinating, but not because of the thrill of victory. Rather, it’s the dread of being grossly humiliated physically in a game, seeing your team get thrashed.

Yeah, sure. But then why do I sit there endlessly watching so many football games on TV? I don’t do that with basketball and hardly ever with baseball, which is a total bore--slower even than my treadmill workouts lately.

Football on TV still entrances me, with its closeups and replays. But it’s not the same as being there, you retort. I admit: It’s much better. I know from experience. The real thing gets tiresome and crowd noise won’t let me doze off if the game gets boring. And if so, at home watching TV I can simply switch channels to a better contest.

But what about the fresh-air, autumnal thrill in the stadium--the bands playing, the drunks sloshing, the crucial plays unseen due to those cute cheerleaders?

I do miss all that a bit, but make up for it monthly by attending those rowdy team breakfasts featuring the veteran members of our ROMEO club (Retired Old Men Eating Out) at the County Fare in Stafford. You should see us do the Wave.

Even so, it’s great to recall those memorable stadium experiences of yore.

--In college, I was there when my Texas Aggies actually defeated Texas U. in College Station, a rarity then and now.

--Earlier, in Dallas my dad and I watched SMU’s wonderful Doak Walker perform in the Cotton Bowl.

--And in Chicago’s Soldier Field, I saw the college all-stars play the reigning NFL champs (in an annual preseason event back then), but missed a great pass by Notre Dame’s Ralph Guglielmi while I was explaining to my wife which number he wore.

For many years my dad and I would go to games, but that was before TV. Much later, in his final days, at age 90-plus and confined to a bed, he still watched his Dallas Cowboys. When they had whipped us again, he’d delightedly phone me from Texas and rub it in. “What happened to the Redskins, Bud?”. (He'll surely chuckle when he sees what the Cowboys will do this weekend.)

In the years since, it’s been great fun celebrating at Super Bowl parties. An unforgettable one: Redskins versus the Broncos. Son Buddy and I once had a tradition of hoisting a cool one whenever Washington scored. Thus, quarterback Doug Williams and the Skins scored five touchdowns in the second quarter. I don’t remember the second half.

Fast-forward to recent college games, many of which have similarly been terrific to watch on TV: Texas beating USC for the national title, Boise State upsetting Oklahoma last winter in perhaps the best college game ever, and then Appalachian State upsetting Michigan this fall. Then of course there was UVA, scoring several cliff-hanging victories.

But never mind, another game is coming on.

Are we to blame for everything?

I have to laugh, Ha Ha, at those professional worriers who claimed not long ago that our spate of hurricanes, culminating in the New Orleans Biggie, sure enough must have been caused by global warming. Trouble is, the Northern Hemisphere now is witnessing the least hurricane activity in 30 years.

Now the furrowed professorial brows, of course, rush to change the subject and fret greatly that global warming sure enough must have caused the California wildfires this fall.

But wait a minute. What does today’s hurricane drought mean? Perhaps nothing at all, just as meaningless as that earlier spate of them had been.

The same thing goes for the wildfires and even our own local drought.(Remember, it’s the one that lingered until those three days this October when six inches of rain came to the rescue in Stafford.) All of them, along with that awful Asian tsunami earlier, are unexplainable, except to say knowingly, after a long pause for dramatic effect, that things after all do change. Yes, Lord.

“Global warming” isn’t even the catch-all explanation in vogue anymore for whatever goes wrong. Hadn’t you noticed? Even Al Gore’s disciples have discarded the term, especially since the records show the globe hasn’t (ahem) gotten any warmer in the past several years.

So now, in trying to get governments to grab even more control than ever over us taxpayers, they have changed the term to—“climate change.” Brilliant! Thus, whether it gets hotter or colder from now on, we polluting souls are to blame and must give up our SUVS for the common good, use ethanol to enrich corn farmers and pick up doggie doo to save the Chesapeake Bay.

But before you begin feeling terrible over what we mortals are doing to our fragile old planet, consider. Please have a seat, pop open a cool one, and, as younger folks would put it, chill.

To wit: You’re nobody ‘til somebody loves you, I still remember that line in the song, which went on to proclaim, “The world’s just the same, you’ll never change it.”

Truer words were never, uh, sung. We should work that sentiment into our National Anthem, which is almost unrecognizable nowadays in most contemporary renditions.

In any event, the world, not the song, will surely still be here after we’re long gone. The dinosaurs must have also had a sense of déjà vu before they expired, undoubtedly worrying that their slothfulness and gigantic environmental footprints produced too much of the methane that doubtless caused global warming, until here came the meteors.

Yes, things change. Happily, we humans have done a pretty good job during our brief stay here. At least, those of us around here have never been better off. We live longer lives and stay healthier and probably happier than ever. Food is abundant and our land is increasingly bountiful. But this makes some people very uneasy.

Namely, our politicians. Without having something meaningful to manage and change and stir up trouble, what will our ruling class be able to do “for the good of the country?” Chill, perhaps?

No way. We must have change and by golly we will. Thanks to the election returns, we’ll be getting some more political changes, probably to no net benefit. Politicians engage in too much nonsense to accomplish much of consequence.

Example: "Hillary tried to get a million dollars [in senatorial earmarks] for the Woodstock museum. I understand it was a major cultural and pharmaceutical event. I couldn't attend. I was tied up at the time." ---Sen. John McCain

Something as nonsensical as those earmarks, designed legally to bribe an elected official’s constituents with tax money earned by others, thrive in Congress despite vigorous efforts to kill them and make our representatives be honest for a change. They don’t want to.

You don’t believe it? Watch how quickly “earmarks,” like “global warming,” disappear from the parlance of politics. It won’t take long to discard that now-disreputable label and call it something else, besides “pork” of course.

However, hereby let me acknowledge a good political deed by a guy I really don’t care for, that smart-aleck junior U.S. Senator of yours and mine, Jim Webb. Turns out, he was one of only five Democrats to help Republicans block Hillary’s daffy Woodstock earmark. Like McCain, Webb was in Vietnam during Woodstock.

And oh yes, while we’re on the subject of politicians, here’s one of my scarce attaboys to the most local of them, our community’s elected board of directors. Despite smirks and bad jokes, they recently established Aquia Harbour’s first Bark Park. Its debut last month was a smash hit. Turns out, according to the Washington Post, more people in Arlington County use their dog parks than their soccer fields.

Kids leave, pets stay.