REsources for Living
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What’s your favorite Thanksgiving memory? I think about being a kid, and watching the Thanksgiving Day parade while the house filled with delicious smells, followed by making “turkeys” that had an apple for a body, and tail feathers constructed of raisins threaded onto toothpicks.
More recently, I remember the Thanksgiving that the whole family gathered at my brother’s house, how we all crowded into his kitchen to make four kinds of pie and five kinds of cranberry sauce as well as the turkey and sundry other fixings.
But memory, by nature, is never complete. Some things always stick more than others. I can easily call to mind the cranberry relish, cranberry sauce with ginger, cranberry chutney, cranberry sauce with pear and cranberry sorbet that we happily constructed in my brother’s kitchen. But it takes an effort of will to come up with the piece of that memory where I had a tiff with my partner about my family’s persistent desire to tell one another a better way to do whatever it was that person was doing. Far easier to just go with the memories that “belong.”
For instance, in the U.S. we remember the Thanksgiving holiday as honoring the anniversary of the “First Thanksgiving” in 1621, when Pilgrims and the local Wampanoag people gathered for a feast of thanksgiving, in honor of the Pilgrims’ first successful harvest. But the letter describing that original feast talks about a harvest festival, not a day of thanksgiving, and certainly there was no description of any plans to make this an annual celebration.
Besides, that First Thanksgiving wasn’t really the first. Setting aside feasts of thanksgiving held by Native Americans long before Europeans came on the scene, our memories have generally missed the fact that in 1541 Spaniard Francisco Vásquez de Coronado and his troops celebrated a “Thanksgiving” while searching for New World gold in what is now the Texas Panhandle. We also forget that thanksgiving feasts were held by French Huguenot colonists in present-day Jacksonville, Florida in 1564, by English colonists and Abenaki at Maine’s Kennebec River in 1607, and by other settlers in Jamestown, Virginia in 1610, when the arrival of a ship carrying food ended a brutal famine.
As individuals and as a society we tend to “forget” things that don’t match up with how we envision the story, whether it’s the screaming and squabbling of the precious children at our holiday celebration or the ways in which our heroes turn out to have their own deep flaws. But beyond that, we’re even quite capable of remembering things that simply never happened. Now, if we’re sure that Uncle Jim saved the day when the oven caught fire during Thanksgiving of 1972, even though it turns out he was living overseas at the time and couldn’t possibly have been there, not much harm is done. But sometimes the need to remember things in a way they never happened takes a more dangerous turn.
Following George Zimmerman’s acquittal for killing Trayvon Martin in Florida, someone posted on a friend’s Facebook page declaring that the justice system was not racist, and that the racism belonged to the masses of African Americans who rioted and looted following the verdict. Only…there were no massive riots and looting. There were some smashed windows in Oakland and Los Angeles, but the vast majority of protests following the verdict were entirely peaceful. This person managed to remember the event in a way that matched his story that Black people are dangerous and violent, thereby letting himself, and all other White people, off the hook for systems of oppression.
The stories we tell will always affect the way we remember. Our minds are simply wired that way. Sometimes those stories help us to be better people, calling us to be like the heroes who were never quite as perfect as we remember them. Sometimes those stories allow us to weasel out of responsibility by assuring us that there was nothing we could have done, that the problem was entirely someone else’s fault. The only solution to our unreliable memories may be to accept that our memories can’t just belong to ourselves alone.
We need to hear other people’s stories, to gather up as broad a range of memories as we can. If I want to know what happened to those long-ago apple-turkeys I could start by asking my mom. My brother’s recollection of the massive Ungar family invasion of his house might be quite different than my own, and his wife’s very different still. But more than that, I need to experience the world by hearing the memories of those whose lives are different from my own: people who live on Iowa farms and in urban Detroit, people who immigrated as children and people whose families have lived in the same place for generations, people who are barely scraping by and people who have inherited wealth, people of different ages and races, with different educations and interests, people who come with a whole range of stories of how we go about being human.
Our own memories are precious, and they deserve to be cherished. But they cannot be relied on to tell the whole story. I suppose there never really is any such thing as the whole story, the One True Way It Happened. But when we take the time to listen, and listen broadly, our stories get richer, more complex and more interesting than any one story can be on its own.
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