Thanksgiving 2022: Synoptic Comments on Overeating, Family History, and William Burroughs

Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, ND

Here I am late for my date with NAM.NAAM/NanoPoblano tonight.

See, since I moved to Corpus Christi over a year ago, I have engaged in an eating binge. I don’t know why. At this late date, I don’t think it’s adoption related. Perhaps boredom? It’s not like eating is bungy jumping, or race car driving, though. Anyway, I won’t go into detail but I ate enough for four–I didn’t have to cook it–thank you Countermans–and then slept one hour for each of them. Now, I want to go back to bed rather than blog tonight.

I planned originally to post a list of sorts: things and people I am thankful for, so I could bypass the settler-colonial dialogue. My own family was just that starting in 1632. A few years later, one of them was a magistrate in Stratford, Connecticut, He hanged a “witch,” Goody Basset. I can’t find a reference on this right now, but one of the charges against her was ownership of a ladder. To compensate, an ice cream shop in Stratford is named for her.

I started an Appreciation List of people and things to be thankful for this year but ran into the fear of forgetting some of them, so I stopped and decided to say only that I am thankful for the passage of OBC access bills in Louisiana, Massachusetts, and Vermont (open July 1, 2023). And for the activists, good friends, allies, partners, coalitioners, and people I don’t even know that made it happen. In a perverse way, I am also grateful to adoptacrats, crackpots, and do-gooders who keep reminding us that our work isn’t done. As I wrote in last year’s Thanksgiving message, reflecting on William Burrough’s Thanksgiving Prayer: