Weekend reads: Giving thanks

Leaning out in Louisiana

Roberto Michel/Getty Images

One of the blessings of having loved ones on both sides of the border is that you get to have two Thanksgivings. In October, we shared a meal in Toronto. And this past week, we celebrated again in North Louisiana. In the days leading up to the holiday, we ate queso and corn chips and fried shrimp po’boys and the world’s best potato salad. We watched football and pored over puzzles and laughed a lot. We drove the winding roads into town. We perused the boutiques, full of the brightly coloured blouses favoured by Southern women. We picked up beignets. We talked to neighbours on the street, and people at the coffee shop.

Nobody, anywhere, seemed to be in much of a rush.

At dusk, we sat outside and watched the sun slip over the treetops, a tangerine sky replaced by the kind of deep-dark nightfall that nourishes the soul.

When Thursday’s family gathering arrived, I sent home photos of the spread: fried turkey and cornbread dressing, macaroni and cheese and green bean casserole, roasted ham and whipped sweet potato crusted with marshmallows. Plus, a parade of pies: chocolate cream, pumpkin, pecan, and my favourite, buttermilk.

There were many of us. So many that we filled all the spots at the kitchen table, and around the dining room table, and then all the stools at the kitchen counter too. There were babies and grandparents, and every age in between. Dogs were perpetually underfoot. It was not hard, as we hung our heads in prayer before the meal, to give genuine thanks for the sweetness of life.

Days later, I was awake before dawn, alive to this feeling again. The house around me was silent. Dogs sprawled out on the living room floor. Washed and dried dishes crowded the countertops. Leftover pies sat wrapped in tinfoil. In the midst of all this abundance, I cast my mind back to the pandemic, and to a season of deprivation.

During the longest months of Toronto’s very long lockdowns, I lived alone in a high-rise condo, logging into my radio job every day from my tiny living room. I sometimes did not come face to face with a single human being for days at a time. When I wasn’t working, I sat on my couch, dazed, hungering for connection.

I felt, for a time, that everything good about life had been wiped away. The newsroom was gone, and with it its adrenaline and sprinting deadlines, its camaraderie and gallows humour. The subway vanished, too, and the market, the bookstore, dinners with friends. I could no longer remember the name of the woman who had fixed my morning cup at the coffee shop. None of these losses had been conceivable, even days before. The shock of realizing it could all be taken away was something I could not shake (and will never forget, will never stop writing about). I called my mother, and she told me, again and again: Hold on. This will pass.

While I was waiting for that to happen, I went for long walks, my coat pulled up against the wind, thinking about what was happening to our culture. There, too, I saw so much deprivation. The books that were sent to me for review were dull and dogmatic; the radio shows tedious, the same talking points repeated endlessly. It seemed that the world had closed in on itself, shutting off so much of what you could think and say. The people I interviewed became ever-more cautious. Everyone began talking in hushed tones, looking over their shoulders, even when they were alone in their own apartments, staring only at screens.

I felt, then, that I was in danger of losing something that I had never imagined could be taken from me: the life of the mind. It had never occurred to me that I may not be able to do the thing that I had spent my entire adult life doing — thinking out loud, with others, in public. I walked the empty streets of my neighbourhood and meditated on my mother’s words: It won’t be like this forever.

I thought of all of this that morning in Louisiana, as dawn arrived. I went to the kitchen to make tea, and looked out the window to find the fields covered in frost. We had been without coats earlier in the week. But here was the arrival of winter. I was struck, then, by how much life changes. Back in the loneliness of the lockdowns of early 2021, I could not know that love would soon arrive, and with it, a whole new American family.

I could not know, either, that thanks to the courage of a determined few, the stifling climate in media and literature would soon give way to something far more fertile, far more life-affirming.

I thought about the Substack essays I’d read that morning, and how energized I’d been by them. After years of stagnation, of lack, the world was suddenly teeming with writers who were as original as they were brave. Who could read Ross Barkan on the rise of Substack and not feel invigorated? Who could read A.M. Hickman and not feel that America was pregnant with possibility? Who could read Sam Kahn and not feel as if a new era in writing had been ushered in?

I understood, as the light rose, just how much I had to be thankful for.

I had not just gained all the Substack writers in my in-box — but all of you readers as well. All of you who send me emails, sharing your own moments of beauty and hope, your own struggles and sorrows. Hold on, I would sometimes write back, this will pass, it won’t be this way forever. Our world is broken, it’s true. But people are good, and things are changing. And we are so much better when we’re together.