An Expat Thanksgiving
I try to live in gratitude. Sometimes I’m more successful than others. I know I’m succeeding when I find myself humming in a traffic jam, exulting in the particular greyness of a lowering sky, or enjoying the enforced moment to slow down while waiting and waiting and waiting for my meal when restaurant service is slow.
But on one day of the year, without exception, my gratitude register overflows. Thanksgiving Day.
On Thanksgiving Day 1962, my family arrived at Idlewilde Airport on a BOAC (British Overseas Airlines Corporation) flight from Johannesburg.
Just from that sentence, you can tell how much the world has changed since then. Idlewilde is now JFK, BOAC is now part of British Airways, and Johannesburg’s official name is Gauteng. The cruel apartheid system is the reason we emigrated to the United States is gone (although reverberations of the injustice and inequality it sowed continue to this day). We, too, are changed.
Fifty-three years ago, my parents, a young couple with three children, made the courageous and difficult decision to leave their home and their family in search of a more equitable society and safer lives for their children. We are fortunate that they have been granted good health and long life; that in their old age they are still together and as much in love as they ever were. The three children they brought with them are now in their sixties, and the extended family that would be sitting around the Thanksgiving table this year number in the thirties. There are children, children-in-law, grandchildren, grandchildren-in-law, children by blood and by marriage, and great-grandchildren. We’ve had our ups and downs my father has said for years that no one gets through life without rubbing up against the sides. But we are together, we are safe, and on the days when we are truly aware, we know that we are rich in what’s important.
On this day of Thanksgiving, we recognize just how fortunate we are and our good is fortune thrown into relief by the pain of so many around the world.
Unlike in 1962, today it’s difficult to be unaware of what’s going on anywhere on the globe. Events in Mali, Paris, Syria, Kenya, Israel, Russia, China and Turkey are as well known to us as the events in Washington, D.C., Ferguson, or Charleston.
Even as our hearts ache for all of the suffering that we human beings still manage to inflict on one another, we are grateful for what we have, and we give thanks for the privilege of living in this time and this place. From our family to yours, good health, peace and happiness. May you, too, have much to be grateful for. And in your gratitude, may you find it in your heart to forgive the angry driver, the slow waiter, the weather that doesn’t cooperate.