Dear Dad: Thanksgiving

Dear Dad,

Happy Thanksgiving — em dash here to conserve exclamation points(!) Nothing particularly noteworthy to report, but it’s quiet in the house and the first snowfall of the season always lends a sense of calm, at least from the inside looking out. 

I’ll confess that I’m having trouble making much sense of the world lately. I find that people are generally good and kind — or at least tolerant when called upon to tolerate each other — but last month’s election tells a different story.

Over the summer, I was thinking about your time volunteering for Eugene McCarthy as a high school senior in 1968. I had thought “Clean for Gene” was about reforming the government, but I learned it referred to young volunteers cutting their hair and shaving their beards to canvas for McCarthy in New Hampshire. This of course reminded me of Groom & Clean, your preferred greaseless hair control for decades. It was both my first encounter with an ampersand and with something in a toothpaste-shaped tube that was not toothpaste.

Democrats in camo hats this year did not have the same effect as those clean-cut hippies. Did it feel like LBJ was more vulnerable to a primary challenger than the Democratic nominee would be to the Republican? Were you still optimistic about the process leading up to the nominating convention in Chicago? After Humphrey? After Nixon?

The ascendancy of RFK Jr. is a distorted and scary echo of 1968. We listened to his interview with David Remnick when you were in the hospital and it seemed implausible that he would find his way from the outer fringes to a seat of power. 

As a small consolation on an otherwise bleak ballot, Elissa Slotkin beat Mike Rogers by about 20,000 votes to succeed Debbie Stabenow. I recall your high praise for Slotkin — “no slouch” — and hope she can be a bridge to better days in Washington. Phoebe and I experienced a brief catharsis with 5,000 fellow NPR totebaggers seeing Governor Whitmer at a taping of Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me! downtown a couple weeks after the election.

I never thought I would be so thankful for the Lions. Perhaps you would have been able to maintain your weekly routine of enjoying a Sunday afternoon nap with the game on in the background, but things are almost too exciting lately. I remember when Bobby Ross moved in next door to us. It was not newsworthy. The Rosses were relieved that we were, at most, casual fans. They would give us tickets occasionally, but the rule was you couldn’t heckle the players because you’d be sitting by their families.

Now the team is off to the best start in franchise history. You would maintain that nothing compared to the weekly fireworks by Barry Sanders and I would agree — but we have a pair of running backs who combine to create a similar spark. (Judah competed in a track meet last year against Sanders’ son, depending on your definition of “competed.”)

Apropos of nothing, our Columbia Lions football team won their first league championship since 1961.

Judah drives. Full stop. As in both a two-word sentence that packs a punch and what we always do at stop signs. He’s a good driver, though these cars increasingly drive themselves. And I’m a good passenger. It wasn’t that long ago you were trying to teach me how to drive a stick shift. That process involved a lot of full stops too, followed by waving to the car behind us to go ahead before pressing down the clutch and turning the ignition. 

At the time, I thought rolling backwards on curving side streets in our Saturn station wagon was more stressful for me, but I doubt that in hindsight. I still remember the comparison you used to help me finally understand manual shifting of gears when I couldn’t make sense of your pantomime of interlocking knuckles. 

Don’t think of it like a digital clock, you said, where the time display changes instantaneously. Instead, it’s like an analog clock where there’s the observable moving between ticks. That’s the time when you have both the gas and the clutch engaged to transition from one gear to the next. Not the most elegant metaphor, but I figured out how to shift and we made it all the way to the cider mill.

I’m trying to hold onto those moments as a parent. Not the adrenaline of making a Michigan left on Woodward with a new driver, but that interstitial time between gears — school, work, soccer, more soccer. That's when I can feel your presence and, as hard as it still is, the feeling is more one of presence than absence. There are moments of shared calm, of quiet gratitude — the beats you can observe if not quite capture before the next minute or month ticks by. 

When we were little, you used to come home from work, still wearing your suit and overcoat, and say, A whole day … a whole day without a hug. Then you (the tallest person) would crouch way down for a big hug. 

These days, however tired we are after a long day of combat — me in court, Phoebe in middle school — or preoccupied by what awaits us in battle tomorrow, either one of can disarm the other just by saying A whole day...