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Thanksgiving weekend: What do you say after you say ‘I’m grateful?’

By Jesse Kornbluth
Published: Nov 24, 2021
Category: Weekend

WHAT DO YOU SAY AFTER YOU SAY “I’M GRATEFUL?” YOU SAY IT AGAIN.
I am grateful for my life. And yours. Such a cliché, but I’m thinking of a news story that surprised me this week: according to federal data and Johns Hopkins University, U.S. Covid-19 deaths in 2021 surpass 2020’s That’s right: more than last year.

And it’s almost entirely because of “lower-than-expected immunization rates as well as fatigue with precautionary measures like masks allowed the highly contagious Delta variant to spread, largely among the unvaccinated.” I know people — former friends — who have made videos calling vaccines a great conspiracy and claiming that Covid statistics are exaggerated. They have blood on their hands and are now dead to me, but they’re not the point. I rarely think about them. I think about my work, places to go, people to see. I have zero time for the rear view mirror.

So yesterday and today and tomorrow, I am grateful for my dear ones, who all know who they are, because Covid taught me to hold less back, and especially for my brother, the family genius, who makes vaccines, and K, who defines support, and most especially my daughter, who was standing with me at a bus stop on a cold winter’s night when she was 8, and a car stopped and offered us a ride home, and I asked my friend how, in the darkness, she knew it was us, and she said, “I saw a man arguing with a child, I knew that was you.” May that “argument” last for decades and decades.

My friend Mary texted me: “An obvious fact hit me today, not for the first time. We will look back on these days and remember how happy they were, and we were.”

Just so. We have food and shelter, and we sit at these screens in heated rooms. We are the luckiest people on the planet.

GRETA THUNBERG: A CHANGE IS GONNA COME
“It is not a secret that COP26 is a failure. It should be obvious that we cannot solve the crisis with the same methods that got us into it in the first place.”
“The COP has turned into a PR event, where leaders are giving beautiful speeches and announcing fancy commitments and targets, while behind the curtains governments of the Global North countries are still refusing to take any drastic climate action.”
“Inside COP, there are just politicians and people in power pretending to take our future seriously. Change is not going to come from inside there, that is not leadership. This is leadership, this is what leadership looks like.”

CAR TALK
I’m grateful for my 1994 Mercedes, which weighs 5,000 pounds, and was more than a car — it protected us for 19 years until it just got too old. And now I am grateful for the Honda Civic, which is a motorized computer with a lot of air bags.

MUSIC
Meditation eludes me, so I use music to tune me for writing. This year, I’ve had great results writing to Danit Treubig and Jennifer Berezen and Glenn Gould.

MOVIES
I’m grateful for movies that matter. I saw Tick Tick… Boom! in a theater, and the audience cheered after some of the songs. And for The Tender Bar. Read the book first if you can. And cherish this boy. And I can’t wait for Licorice Pizza.

HELLO, DARKNESS
I am grateful I don’t live in Barrow, Alaska, where the sun sets on November 18 and rises again on January 23 — after 67 days of darkness.

FROM TWITTER: A FATHER’S NOTE TO A SON WHO HASN’T COME OUT YET
Nate –
I overheard your phone conversation with Mike last night about your plans to come out, and to me the only thing I need you to plan is to bring home OJ and bread after class. We are out, like you now.
I’ve known you were gay since you were six. I’ve loved you since you were born.
– Dad
PS: Your mom and I think you and Mike make a cute couple.

LOUIS DeJOY
I am grateful that the man who destroyed sorting machines before the election may not be Postmaster General much longer.

RADIO GARDEN
I am grateful for a service that lets me visit any city in the world and listen to a local radio station.

A GOOD HUMAN STORY: “I WAS STUCK ON A CROSSTOWN BUS IN NEW YORK CITY DURING RUSH HOUR. A PREGNANT WOMAN GOT ON, AND NOBODY OFFERED HER A SEAT. RAGE WAS IN THE AIR. AND THEN THE BUS DRIVER…”

from Elizabeth Gilbert:

Some years ago, I was stuck on a crosstown bus in New York City during rush hour. Traffic was barely moving. The bus was filled with cold, tired people who were deeply irritated with one another, with the world itself. Two men barked at each other about a shove that might or might not have been intentional. A pregnant woman got on, and nobody offered her a seat. Rage was in the air; no mercy would be found here.

But as the bus approached Seventh Avenue, the driver got on the intercom. “Folks,” he said, “I know you have had a rough day and you are frustrated. I can’t do anything about the weather or traffic, but here is what I can do. As each one of you gets off the bus, I will reach out my hand to you. As you walk by, drop your troubles into the palm of my hand, okay? Don’t take your problems home to your families tonight, just leave them with me. My route goes right by the Hudson River, and when I drive by there later, I will open the window and throw your troubles in the water.”

It was as if a spell had lifted. Everyone burst out laughing. Faces gleamed with surprised delight. People who had been pretending for the past hour not to notice each other’s existence were suddenly grinning at each other like, is this guy serious?

Oh, he was serious.

At the next stop, just as promised, the driver reached out his hand, palm up, and waited. One by one, all the exiting commuters placed their hand just above his and mimed the gesture of dropping something into his palm. Some people laughed as they did this, some teared up but everyone did it. The driver repeated the same lovely ritual at the next stop, too. And the next. All the way to the river.

We live in a hard world, my friends. Sometimes it is extra difficult to be a human being. Sometimes you have a bad day. Sometimes you have a bad day that lasts for several years. You struggle and fail. You lose jobs, money, friends, faith, and love. You witness horrible events unfolding in the news, and you become fearful and withdrawn. There are times when everything seems cloaked in darkness. You long for the light but don’t know where to find it.

But what if you are the light? What if you are the very agent of illumination that a dark situation begs for?. That’s what this bus driver taught me, that anyone can be the light, at any moment. This guy wasn’t some big power player. He wasn’t a spiritual leader. He wasn’t some media-savvy influencer. He was a bus driver, one of society’s most invisible workers. But he possessed real power, and he used it beautifully for our benefit.

NOVEMBER 22, 1963
The day passed almost unnoticed – even to me, and I’d published a book about JFK and Mary Meyer just a year ago! Nothing anyone has written about that weekend tops what Jimmy Breslin wrote, on deadline, because he had the presence of mind to avoid the funeral procession sand go to the cemetery.

‘It’s An Honor’ New York Herald Tribune, by Jimmy Breslin

Clifton Pollard was pretty sure he was going to be working on Sunday, so when he woke up at 9 a.m., in his three-room apartment on Corcoran Street, he put on khaki overalls before going into the kitchen for breakfast. His wife, Hettie, made bacon and eggs for him. Pollard was in the middle of eating them when he received the phone call he had been expecting. It was from Mazo Kawalchik, who is the foreman of the gravediggers at Arlington National Cemetery, which is where Pollard works for a living. “Polly, could you please be here by 11 o’clock this morning?” Kawalchik asked. “I guess you know what it’s for.” Pollard did. He hung up the phone, finished breakfast, and left his apartment so he could spend Sunday digging a grave for John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

When Pollard got to the row of yellow wooden garages where the cemetery equipment is stored, Kawalchik and John Metzler, the cemetery superintendent, were waiting for him. “Sorry to pull you out like this on a Sunday,” Metzler said. “Oh, don’t say that,” Pollard said. “Why, it’s an honor for me to be here.” Pollard got behind the wheel of a machine called a reverse hoe. Gravedigging is not done with men and shovels at Arlington. The reverse hoe is a green machine with a yellow bucket that scoops the earth toward the operator, not away from it as a crane does. At the bottom of the hill in front of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Pollard started the digging.

Leaves covered the grass. When the yellow teeth of the reverse hoe first bit into the ground, the leaves made a threshing sound which could be heard above the motor of the machine. When the bucket came up with its first scoop of dirt, Metzler, the cemetery superintendent, walked over and looked at it. “That’s nice soil,” Metzler said. “I’d like to save a little of it,” Pollard said. “The machine made some tracks in the grass over here and I’d like to sort of fill them in and get some good grass growing there, I’d like to have everything, you know, nice.”

James Winners, another gravedigger, nodded. He said he would fill a couple of carts with this extra-good soil and take it back to the garage and grow good turf on it. “He was a good man,” Pollard said. “Yes, he was,” Metzler said. “Now they’re going to come and put him right here in this grave I’m making up,” Pollard said. “You know, it’s an honor just for me to do this.”

Pollard is 42. He is a slim man with a mustache who was born in Pittsburgh and served as a private in the 352nd Engineers battalion in Burma in World War II. He is an equipment operator, grade 10, which means he gets $3.01 an hour. One of the last to serve John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who was the 35th president of this country, was a working man who earns $3.01 an hour and said it was an honor to dig the grave.

Yesterday morning, at 11:15, Jacqueline Kennedy started toward the grave. She came out from under the north portico of the White House and slowly followed the body of her husband, which was in a flag-covered coffin that was strapped with two black leather belts to a black caisson that had polished brass axles. She walked straight and her head was high. She walked down the bluestone and blacktop driveway and through shadows thrown by the branches of seven leafless oak trees. She walked slowly past the sailors who held up flags of the states of this country. She walked past silent people who strained to see her and then, seeing her, dropped their heads and put their hands over their eyes. She walked out the northwest gate and into the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue. She walked with tight steps and her head was high and she followed the body of her murdered husband through the streets of Washington.

Everybody watched her while she walked. She is the mother of two fatherless children and she was walking into the history of this country because she was showing everybody who felt old and helpless and without hope that she had this terrible strength that everybody needed so badly. Even though they had killed her husband and his blood ran onto her lap while he died, she could walk through the streets and to his grave and help us all while she walked.

There was Mass, and then the procession to Arlington. When she came up to the grave at the cemetery, the casket already was in place. It was set between brass railings and it was ready to be lowered into the ground. This must be the worst time of all, when a woman sees the coffin with her husband inside and it is in place to be buried under the earth. Now she knows that it is forever. Now there is nothing. There is no casket to kiss or hold with your hands. Nothing material to cling to. But she walked up to the burial area and stood in front of a row of six green-covered chairs and she started to sit down, but then she got up quickly and stood straight because she was not going to sit down until the man directing the funeral told her what seat he wanted her to take.

The ceremonies began, with jet planes roaring overhead and leaves falling from the sky. On this hill behind the coffin, people prayed aloud. They were cameramen and writers and soldiers and Secret Service men and they were saying prayers out loud and choking. In front of the grave, Lyndon Johnson kept his head turned to his right. He is president and he had to remain composed. It was better that he did not look at the casket and grave of John Fitzgerald Kennedy too often. Then it was over and black limousines rushed under the cemetery trees and out onto the boulevard toward the White House. “What time is it?” a man standing on the hill was asked. He looked at his watch. “Twenty minutes past three,” he said.

Clifton Pollard wasn’t at the funeral. He was over behind the hill, digging graves for $3.01 an hour in another section of the cemetery. He didn’t know who the graves were for. He was just digging them and then covering them with boards. “They’ll be used,” he said. “We just don’t know when. I tried to go over to see the grave,” he said. “But it was so crowded a soldier told me I couldn’t get through. So I just stayed here and worked, sir. But I’ll get over there later a little bit. Just sort of look around and see how it is, you know. Like I told you, it’s an honor.”

CHARLES DICKENS
If you create anything, you know you’re standing on someone’s shoulders. To stand on the shoulders of Charles Dickens to create an abridged edition of A Christmas Carol… that’s to stand on the shoulders of a giant. Better believe I’m grateful.