Clinton, South Carolina, Thursday, November 28, 2019, 8:11 a.m.

My favorite holiday is Thanksgiving.

This should come as no surprise. I’m fat, and there’s food. Family. Football. I must be 4-F in the Thanksgiving draft.

I’m mostly a happy guy. I love baseball, too. Hot dogs, especially the ones at Whiteford’s Drive-In, the ones with slaw on them. Apple pie, especially with a dollop of vanilla on top. And this year I own a Chevrolet for the first time in decades.

The cliches are backward. It should be merry Thanksgiving and happy Christmas.

It’s been a good year. The future is cloudy, but the year has been clear. I don’t think this is a result of government policy. I just caught a few breaks after a string of bad ones. I worked hard. I didn’t work any harder. A few things just worked.

I spent part of Wednesday in an unfinished building and part in a hospital room. That’s life in a nutshell.

It shouldn’t really be about me. Thanksgiving is the opposite of that. I am the captain of my fate, but the waves are choppy and the forecast bleak. Life’s crew relies on one another.

The words of songs course through my mind at morning. The task before this one was posting one of those lyrics on social media.

In the magic that morning is bringing / This song for the life I have found / It keeps my feet on the ground. – Rodney Crowell.

I could listen to Jerry Jeff Walker sing that song all day, but I’ll probably watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade and football games. I might play it on guitar, though. At halftime.

The feast isn’t until Saturday this year. It’s a matter of part of the family going to the other in-laws today, and then this part getting together on Saturday evening because Clemson is playing South Carolina at noon. Coincidentally, Furman is in Clarksville, Tennessee, playing Austin Peay in the FCS playoffs. I considered driving all the way up there, but it’s good I didn’t because, as it turns out, Thanksgiving is Saturday.

Age tells a man that, sure, life isn’t supposed to be be easy, but, at some point, that wouldn’t be so bad.

Work becomes measured in hours, not labor. On second thought, this may just be the case of writers, who never retire. Life ends, head resting on a keyboard, lines of letters streaming over and over across the screen until the body is discovered or the memory fills. When a writer retires, he expires.

That way, a man he never knew will get to say to mourners, “He died doing what he loved.”

It’s a small world getting forever smaller. Last night I looked up Cyprus. That was because I first looked up Aqaba because “Lawrence of Arabia,” my favorite movie, was on TCM. I noticed that Cyprus isn’t far off the coast of Syria when I hit the “minus” button several times on the map. I read all about the never-ending conflict on the islands between Greek Cypriots and Turkish ones.

I can’t imagine that ten minutes having been useful. I don’t see me leaning against the wall of a high school gym, and saying to the junior varsity coach, “You know, Cyprus is quite a tourist destination, but I’d never go there. Nah, not me. Too much conflict between the Greeks and the Turks.”

Nor would I expect the coach to say, “I don’t know, man. Nicosia’s nice.”

I’m a whiz at most things that don’t make money.

Oddly, I am thankful for that, too.

 

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My eighth novel is called Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

Lightning in a Bottle is now available in an audio version, narrated by Jay Harper.