Thankful

It's Thanksgiving Day, and the streets are empty of people. The usual hustle of my neighborhood is only a trickle of couples carrying bottles of wine and casserole dishes to turkey dinners; the nearly constant gusts of laundry steam coming from basement windows are replaced by wafting poultry. The most crowded buses are only ferrying ghosts. The city is quiet. It is still.

My adopted father is coming over for dinner tonight, and it is our first Thanksgiving without his partner, my other adopted father, D. It is my second Thanksgiving without my mom. It is the 20th Thanksgiving without my birth father. It is the third Thanksgiving without my ex's family. And so on and so on.

I am not sad about this, though. Thanksgiving has never left me feeling very sentimental.

But my city does.

This city has been my home for seven and a half years now. And though I've lost family, friends, jobs, as I've evolved and changed, my city is here. And it is vibrant and the same. My feet hit a certain rhythm on these sidewalks that they carry nowhere else. Fallen leaves are rained on and then crushed underfoot and leaf-shaped stains look like intentional stencils. But they are not so conjured. They are real. My city is real. And so am I, in it.

Last night my mother-in-law was talking about a fancy wedding. She said she had heard that the couple wasn't really in love, and it was about the show of the thing. "How could you marry someone you aren't in love with?" asked my brother-in-law. Everyone else nodded in agreement.

"I did," I said.

That's awkward. But it's part of my history and, subsequently, part of who I am. Part of the person they have come to love. So I said, "I did. I did that." And it got awkward. But I told them I had really married his family, it was his family I had loved. They sort of seemed to understand that, at least intellectually.

I can so clearly see the dining table, usually so casual, fancy for Thanksgiving. I can see the tiny kitchen buzzing with activity, all of us buzzing with alcohol, Gordon Lightfoot or Tom Petty or James Taylor the soundtrack to it all. Dogs whining for food. Three people sharing one chair, giggling.

Maybe I do get sentimental. But unlike missing my mother, which is crippling, today I find myself wanting to bundle up against the chill off Lake Michigan and take my dog for a walk around my absurdly quiet and absurdly beautiful city.