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The Travelingest Day

Category: Ramblings

Published Date

Written by Teri Dunn Chace

Every year, the TV, radio, newspapers, and internet news services tell us that more Americans travel on (and around) Thanksgiving than any other time. More than Christmas, more than Memorial Day weekend. It is supposed to be a joyous time of gathering around a feast table with loved ones.

Of course, it isn’t for everyone, or not every year. Fares are jacked up and if you waited too long to get a ticket, schedules are tricky and you realize with a sigh that you are going to have to make a heroic effort. Flights, buses and trains are full, and there are epic traffic jams. Your destination is a table laden with predictable food and conversation with people whom, to put it kindly, often drive you crazy. En route, you listen to somebody on NPR or read a magazine article that decries the falseness of the holiday, reminding us what imperialist jerks the Pilgrims really were. If you are the host or hostess, you get to wedge into a packed grocery store, where the only turkeys left are too big or too little. When you start to prepare the meal, you realize you bought cilantro when you meant to get parsley, and you wonder how you are going to get every side dish to come out at approximately the same moment—unless and until you lighten up.

I’m exaggerating here, uh, only a little! But Thanksgiving always does seem to be a “loaded” day emotionally. No gifts are exchanged, no traditional ceremonies are required before or after, and so the communal meal is the sole focus—too much pressure for some of us. And yet, the year you skip it all, with equal measures of guilt and relief, can be surprisingly and achingly lonely.

The getting there: There is a weird, unique internal shift when you travel to a Thanksgiving destination. Because it is the travelingest day, the trip simply is not going to be quick or easy, and accepting that keeps you from blowing a gasket. Instead, your mind can slip into a removed, even contemplative state. People and sounds around you seem buffered, and for a time you enter an emotional realm that is yours alone.

An old song by Simon & Garfunkel always captures this sensation for me. No, not “Homeward Bound” (“Home/where my thought’s escaping/Home/Where my love lies waiting/Silently for me”), not that one. It’s the one where a young Paul Simon is traveling on a Greyhound bus and, even with a companion by his side, is overtaken by a poignant, rootless, private loneliness:

Kathy, I’m lost, I said, though I knew she was sleeping

I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why

Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike

They’ve all gone to look for America

When you feel something like this in transit to Thanksgiving, you long for your spirit to get some sort of nourishment when you get there.

The being there: To inhabit that “traveling bubble” and then enter a familiar house and sit at a familiar table with familiar people makes for another shift. You are thrust into action now, whether it’s hearing the cadence of your own voice in greetings, or helping in the kitchen, or setting the table and finding extra chairs. It gets busy, and noisy.

But notice how present you are. The magic of this holiday is that, for one meal, you are neither lost nor far away, neither distracted nor hungry. You are intimately THERE. Notice, feel affection for, and give thanks for the enriching gift that this is—before you enter the commotion of cleaning up and your return trip and get swept up once again in the momentum and anonymity of daily life.