Thanksgiving Food for Thought

Yesterday, I was talking long-distance to a 38 year old friend, the mother of two young children, who told me that this summer she revealed rather unexpectedly and compulsively, while visiting with long lost relatives whom she had never before met in person, that her favorite word was "fuck." Rather than blanch and stumble in blind shock and embarrassment off her assumed wide, shady and conservative mid-western front porch, they fell in line with her preference and celebrated the occasional and surprising likeness of family.

Her comment reminded me of an experience one of my best friends had over thirty years ago in the mid-seventies. She was in the Winn-Dixie in her small Bible-belt community, where her husband held a politically important job and she had already set herself up as a little strange by opening the town's first Montessori Pre-school. Both family incomes depended on a reflection of propriety defined by rural-southern-Christianity. As she pushed her cart through the aisles this particular morning, her three-year-old trailed behind commenting, fortunately with a heavy lisp, on the items he recognized on the grocery shelves. "Fuck, fucking, fucking corn flakes. Fuck, fucking, fucking Cheerios." I had suggested to her the year before that she used the f-word a lot in front of her children. She pointed out that she didn't say it any more often than I said "shit." Okay. For the next decade at least she stammered out f-f-f-fudge everytime the occasion called for her favorite expletive.

This afternoon, I was reading the blog of another 40ish person, whose writing I like very much. He wrote that it had been suggested that he was using the "f-word" too frequently in his blog, probably by someone who works for him and wants to protect his assets.

Now the word fuck doesn't have much to do with Thanksgiving in my recent experience. There was the year my then 17 year old daughter felt compelled to use it at the Thanksgiving dinner table in the presence of her grandmother. While I nearly went into convulsions, my mother barely blinked and ask her granddaughter to pass the dressing. (Her reaction was the same, a couple years later when my daughter's tattoo, which she had been hiding from her grandmother for at least 18 months, peeked below her shirt sleeve at another family dinner. It should be noted that had I said "fuck" in her presence or even "shit" as a full grown adult parent on the verge of being a grandparent or let a tattoo slip into her view, she would have had plenty to say.)

We humans often think we know all we need to know of other by the many categories into which we so eagerly put people; we road-block learning and the sharing of ideas by myriad criteria and silly judgements. You would think we'd realize from the wide variety of people who are comfortable these days with the f-word, if from no other indicator, that we are as Maya Angelou has said, "More alike than we are different" and that we all lose by labeling, categorizing. Today I found the Thanksgiving message I intend to share with my friends, relatives, acquaintances and loved ones of all ages, mid-western, southern, liberal, conservative, whatever label they may be peeking from behind or burdened with by others. I'm sharing it with you too. Click Here. Then read the November 18th post.