In Lockdown for Thanksgiving

 

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday and I miss it. Here in France, lots of Americans celebrate this day by preparing a Thanksgiving feast with all the trimmings. But having partaken of these meals, I can say it’s not the same. Turkey and stuffing somehow taste better when I share them with my family in the United States.

This year, on Thanksgiving Day, France was in lockdown. Since late October, the nation has once again been placed under quarantine. In terms of per capita deaths, the figures in France are close to those of the US. Hospitals cannot keep up with the arrival of new patients and testing capacities remain inadequate. In public we wear masks and the government asks citizens to limit private gatherings to no more than six persons.

 

A week before Thanksgiving Day, the C.D.C. encouraged Americans to do the same: stay home and celebrate with the immediate family instead of taking off during what traditionally is the most busy travel time of the year. Somehow it doesn’t feel like Thanksgiving, at least not the way it used to be.

This year on Thanksgiving Day, I sat home alone. Except for the allotted hour of outdoor exercise, in my case, a walk through forest and fields, I spent the day inside, under quarantine. I ate pasta with pesto sauce and a spinach salad, probably the greenest Thanksgiving dinner of my life, and I gave thanks. I am well, all my basic needs are satisfied, and I love and am loved. This is what is essential in life.

As always, in lockdown or not, I spend a lot of time reading. This month, two books have stood out. One is a biography of Abraham Lincoln. Entitled very simply “Abe,” it is written by David Reynolds, who has placed Lincoln within the cultural context of his times. I am learning that our 16^th president was quite a roughneck in his youth, brawling to prove his strength, but rejecting eye-gouging, a practice popular among young men on the frontier.

 

In the 1830’s, the state of Illinois, where Lincoln first held elected office, was where that frontier began and settlers were not afraid of taking the law into their own hands. If you disagreed with your neighbor, you went after him with a horsewhip. If a newspaper editor expressed ideas you didn’t like, you simply shot him dead.

In November 1837, the year Lincoln was elected to the Illinois legislature, this is exactly what happened to Elijah Parish Lovejoy, an abolitionist newspaper editor in Alton, Illinois. He was attacked and killed while defending his printing presses from an angry pro-slavery mob. In 1838, in a state where anti-abolitionists were a majority, Lincoln spoke out against what he called the “mobocratic spirit” behind the attack and cautioned that such incidents threatened to destroy American democracy.

 

A passionate and emotional man, Lincoln understood the importance of controlling emotions and bringing about change through debate, persuasion, and the law. Growing up on the frontier, he feared both anarchy and tyranny and was not afraid of knocking fledgling tyrants down a notch. He understood all too well that a tyrant with no respect for the American system could possibly take control.

Above all, he placed his respect in the law, for even a bad law can be changed. “Let reverence for the laws, Lincoln wrote, be breathed by every American—let it be the political religion. If we fail, we must die by suicide.”

Quarantined with Abraham Lincoln, I am in good company.

In my French home, I also have a piece of Pottsville, a book about the anthracite region. I am reading “River of Gifts” written by Sherrill Silberling and illustrated by JoAnne Doyle. 

 

In a collection of short stories, Ms. Silberling has turned her mother’s memories of Schuylkill County in the 1920’s into stories told simply and lovingly, perfect holiday reading. These are tales of a happy childhood in a loving family, back in the days when food, shelter, and love were enough. The final story in the collection, “The Gift,” is a tribute to a mother who, by instilling trust, gave the gift of life-long confidence to her child. Next to love, is there a gift more precious?

So far, my time in quarantine has been well spent in the nurturing company of good books, but don’t worry, I do other things besides read. Occasionally I watch a good movie on TV. A few night ago, I watched an excellent made-for-TV movie called “La maladroite,” The Awkward Girl,” directed by Eleanor Faucher. Based on true events, it tells the story of a young girl whose parents first destroy their daughter’s confidence and then take her life.

According to the latest official statistics, which concern 2018, 80 children a year in France lose their lives because of family violence. That comes to one child every five days. In many cases, such as that of Marina Sabatier, whose child-abuse death in 2009 inspired the film, teachers and social workers are aware of the abuse, doctors intervene, yet it seems almost impossible to remove the child from the home. Often, the abused child loves and protects the parents because abuse is all she knows.

To appreciate “La maladroite,” a viewer does not need to understand French. Elsa Hyvaert, the very young actress who plays the role of the abused child, speaks a poignant language beyond words. I encourage readers to watch this film and here is a link where it can be streamed:  https://www.france.tv/series-et-fictions/telefilms/1103191-la-maladroite.html

 

A 2019 report found that child-abuse related deaths are on the rise in Pennsylvania. In Annville, in neighboring Lebanon County, a 12-year-old boy was found dead of starvation and abuse in September 2020. The father and his fiancée have been charged with homicide. The Lebanon County DA Pier Hess Graf stated that this boy “never knew the unconditional love from a family.”

Covid and political turmoil seem to reign everywhere in the world today, yet a child who is loved, anyone who is loved, has much to be thankful for. This, for me, is what it means to be “pro-life,” making sure a child’s emotional and physical needs are met from birth onwards. Though my wish may be little more than an ideal, this is what I hope for every child.

Beauty, Truth and Autumn

When we are in high school, we are forced to read poetry. “Forced,” that’s the way many of us feel though a happy few develop a love of verse. Yet, despite the “forced feeding,” some of the poems get through and stick for life, returning at unexpected times or dogging us with lines that we can’t get out of our heads, like a song heard on the radio in the morning, that follows us through the day.

I was one of those who had to be “forced fed.” I loved big thick novels, plots that made me think or puzzled me. With Ms. Cheryl Silberling, in our advanced literature class, we read “Crime and Punishment.” I loved that big thick book and was haunted by the questions it posed about forgiveness and salvation. And I remember Raskolnikov’s bloody socks. In high school, few things were as important as our appearance. I imagined wearing those socks to school and how bad they would have smelled! No one in their right mind would have wanted to be seen with me.

With Ms. Silberling, we also read poetry in English Literature. I liked “The Ancient Mariner.” Picture yourself wearing a dead albatross slung around your neck! We also read excerpts from Wordsworth’s “Prelude,” where the poet declares “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.” That appealed to the mystic leanings that were a part of my adolescence.

Keats, though, was something else. I can’t say I understood everything I read, but the sounds entranced me and I liked to read his odes aloud. I still read them aloud and today hear a much different tune. In high school we read “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Love, youth, frozen forever in clay, what can that mean to someone who is 17-years-old? At that age, eternity, be it eternal love or eternal beauty, does not appear beyond our grasp, at least it didn’t to me. I thought I’d always be thin, I’d always have long flowing brown locks, and my face would always be wrinkle-free.

Now when I read that ode, it cuts me to the quick. The lover in the poem remains ever poised on the threshold of love, his lady-love, forever young. They never kiss yet their love will never undergo the test of time.

Keat’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” has undergone that test, as beautiful today as when he wrote it in 1819, and if you haven’t read it since high school, I’d recommend you go back and have a second look. Its final lines, by far the most famous, are limpid in their simplicity yet enigmatic: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all/ Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

 

 

Only yesterday, during an early evening walk, those lines came back to me. Despite a menacing sky to the east, it was the end of a perfect autumn day. The air was crisp and cool and low-riding cumulus clouds were tinged by the setting sun. Then it started to rain, a beating and cold downpour. I pulled up my hood and kept walking with, at my back, a still brilliant sun. In front of me, before my very eyes, a double rainbow appeared and I could even perceive its base (though I did not find the pot of gold). It was an overwhelming spectacle of natural beauty that made me feel grateful to be alive. 

 

Beauty is truth, truth beauty, I thought, my mind returning to Keats, and then wondering what those lines mean to me today.

The rain stopped, the air was crystalline and every tree shimmered in the evening light. Once the rainbow disappeared, a breathtaking sunset took its place.

The natural world is not like us. It does not lie or create “fake news.” Its beauty is entire and its destruction all the more heart-wrenching. Some Americans, and among them, many who belong to the religious Right, doubt the reality of climate change. Yet, for people who consider themselves religious, isn’t it a duty to protect the natural world, a gift from God? Isn’t it a duty to look seriously at the climate change taking place in the world today and seek to understand its causes? “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” but acquiring knowledge requires effort and good will.

Today is Sunday. Many residents of Schuylkill County go to church. It’s a good day to reflect upon beauty and truth. It’s also a good time of year. How I miss the explosion of color on the trees in autumn! There’s nothing in France to compare to a beautiful autumn day “in the Skook.”

But it is Sunday and somewhere deep inside me a preacher is lurking. Don’t worry. I will not preach, but I will quote a theologian and thinker who is important to me, Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI. On the subject of truth he writes, “Any authentic search for peace must begin with the realization that the problem of truth and untruth is the concern of every man and woman; it is decisive for the peaceful future of our planet.”

When Joseph Ratzinger was 16, he was drafted as an auxiliary member of the Luftwaffe. Though anti-Nazi, he was forced to serve the Reich. Reflecting in the 21^st century upon World War II and the millions of deaths directly linked to the lies of the Nazi regime, he writes, “How can we fail to be seriously concerned about lies in our own time?”

As I write, it is once again a beautiful autumn day. The natural world is decked out in her Sunday best and her beauty brings home a resounding truth: Nature has nothing to hide.

Since the 17^th century, scientists have sought to uncover her secrets and take control of her powers, and beyond their wildest dreams, they have succeeded. Yet Nature continues to show us her true face, in creation and destruction alike.

Legend has it that confronted with his father’s felled cherry tree, George Washington said, “Father, I cannot tell a lie. I chopped it down.”

The real world is not like legend, yet wouldn’t there be great beauty in a President who aspired to tell the American people the truth?

As Keats wrote, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all/ Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”