Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. Not when I was young when the adults sat at a separate table and seemed to be having more fun, but now when I am one of the adults having fun. Thanksgiving is just a time to get together – with people you want to be with – and give thanks. But now there are cracks starting to appear in this idealized facade. Today, it is easier to see the echo of our past being played out in Israel/Palestine. The first Thanksgiving was a nice dinner with some Indians who – in the long run – had most of their land taken away – not to mention that the majority of them died (although murdered may be more accurate).

 I have mixed emotions about this and am reminded of my grandmother Bambow. After my grandfather died, my grandmother lived alone, and every couple of weeks, one or more of her descendants – usually my mother and, less often, me – would go up to Santa Rosa and take her shopping. She would fill her shopping cart to overflowing, and then she would waddle to the checkout counter pushing the cart while one of us would follow, picking up the boxes that slid off of the pile. Once, as my grandmother got close to the checkout, a woman with a bottle of milk tried to scurry ahead of her. (This was way before the time of 15 items or fewer checkout lines.) With a mighty shove, my grandmother pushed her cart in front of this poor soul, cutting her off.

The woman couldn’t believe it, and I couldn’t either. It was just such a nasty move. The woman looked at my grandmother and said “Well, I hope you are happy!” My grandmother looked back at her and said, “Of course, I am, I won, didn’t I?” I probably took the opportunity to admire the floor tiles.

But now I feel a bit like that about the Indians or First Nations, if you prefer. What we did is probably to the point of being genocide. Still, the world is becoming kinder, more compassionate. Every day, there are more acts of love and kindness. And I am happy that we are here, on this wonder-filled continent, celebrating Thanksgiving.

“The cries of the Palestinian and Israeli children sound no different to me. What I don’t understand is why the cries of Palestinians sound different to you all.” -@RepRashida

In one of its few bipartisan votes, the House of Representatives censured Rashida Talib, its only Palestinian member, a week or so ago, and I’m not sure why. I know that they said it was because she used the phrase “From the river to the sea.” which, defacto, proves she is an anti-semite, but… really? It upset me way more than I expected, and I want to talk about it.

I’m going to start by saying anti-Semitism exists, and a good case can be made that it is getting worse. Also, I would be willing to bet money that there are anti-Semites in Congress. Over my lifetime, however, anti-Semitism has changed. When I was younger, anti-semites were the so-called good people, the town elites, and now they are considered declasse. But, while being an anti-Semite may no longer considered fashionable, it is still threatening.

I also want to say that Jewish people, in the US, in Europe, and even in Israel, are not the same as the Israeli government, and criticism of the Israeli State’s treatment of Palestinians is not, necessarily anti-Semitism.

Every day, we swim in an almost infinite sea of opinions passed off as fact. All – maybe this should be prefaced with almost, but I don’t think so -news and information sources we get are biased, FOX and the New York Times are both biased. This sea of opinion influences who we are and what we think, it influences what we believe down to our bones.

One of these opinions that are often presented as fact is the definition of racism and, specifically, anti-sematism. When somebody does not like a specific Jewish person or a specific thing they did, that does not make them an anti-Semite. A lot of money and a lot of ink – pixels now, I guess – is spent every year to convince us that they are the same. A great majority of that money comes from AIPAC – which I believe stands for American Israeli Public Affairs Committee – and AIPAC is out to get Talib.

As an aside, AIPAC does not like any members of the Squad, according to The New Republic: Sources say AIPAC is gearing up to spend over *$100 MILLION* as part of a campaign to knock the Squad out of Congress in 2024. Cori Bush, Ilhan Omar, Jamaal Bowman, Summer Lee, and Rashida Tlaib are all marked for high-dollar challenges. End Aside.

Lastly, but most importantly, Rashida Tlaib is not an anti-Semite, she is one of the good guys. Yes, she strongly disagrees with Israeli policy, but that does not make her an anti-Semite. On her Congressional website, Talib says, I have repeatedly denounced the horrific targeting and killing of civilians by Hamas and the Israeli government, and have mourned the Israeli and Palestinian lives lost. (https://tlaib.house.gov/).

There, now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, I feel much better.

We got home about the 21st of last month, COVID-free, I think. My first COVID symptoms were on October 10th when we were at Harper’s Ferry. I read that symptoms can appear two to fourteen days after exposure which means I could have been exposed anytime, anywhere, on our trip. But, on this Veterans’ Day, 2023, I am COVID-free. Yeah!

But I’m not symptom-free. My smell and taste are back, I don’t have a headache or body aches, and I don’t have a fever. But – and it is a big but – I am still fatigued. I think I still have something, maybe long COVID, whatever that is. I am exhausted all the time.

I wrote the end of the above about three or four days ago, and I started it close to three weeks ago. Most of those days were filled with my just staring into space. It was concerning. But, for the last three days, I’ve felt better – substantially so – every day. Yeah! Indeed.

In what seems like weeks ago, I went to the doctor’s, a new General Practitioner recommended by Michele. The first White Male I’ve had for a doctor in, I think, twenty-one years. He ordered blood work and a chest X-ray which I got at Sequoia Hospital, the day before yesterday. The X-ray Department is right next to the Emergency Department at Sequoia, BTW. After the X-ray, just as I left the changing room, I got dizzy. Standing there, sweating, trying to stand up by holding on to the chair rail for dear life, trying to catch my breath, somebody asked if I was OK, and I said, “No”. A minute, two at the most, later I was in the Emergency Department, and three hours later, Michele gave me a ride home. I have no idea what happened. Neither does anybody else. Still, Life Is Good. Grand, even.

Pittsburgh, the Paris of Appalachia. Some wag, maybe Brian O’Neill.

Michele and I are back from our trip, and I’m searching for a theme to write about it. Maybe there isn’t one, maybe it was just a half dozen triplets, maybe the theme is the contrast between the foreground of being with sweet, generous people and the background in Ukraine and Israel of the human animal at its worst, or maybe everything doesn’t have a theme. Maybe themes are just the way our imagination makes us feel the world makes sense. Maybe it doesn’t.

When we travel, we are both drawn to the big cities and find them repetitive. That is because we go to the same kind of places in the cities, over and over again, the museums which, increasingly, show similar artists and the – for lack of a better descriptor – upscale tourist areas. The Fifth Avenue area in New York and the Spanish Steps in Rome are examples; both have the same stores as Union Square. In Pittsburgh, our first stop, we stayed with Al and Arlene Grubbs, third-generation Pittsburgh natives and aficionados of everything Pittburghian. Through their eyes, we saw a Pittsburgh we never would have seen otherwise.

When we met with Al and Arleen, they had tickets to a Jazz Concert on Saturday evening and a musical on the life of Billie Strayhorn on Sunday. They invited us to join them and both were excellent. It left me wanting to take more advantage of the abundance of musical and visual art resources we have. Staying home for years, literally, during COVID has diminished my life. Contrasting that diminished life with the richness of Al and Arleen’s was inspirational and remains so even though I am still recovering from the dreaded COVID.

One only-in-Pittsburgh tour we went on was the now-defunct Carrie Blast furnace. Interestingly, blast furnaces were named after women, real women, and, I read, the Carrie was probably named after Carrie Moorhead Holland. However, Michele tells me that the new thinking is that it was named after Caroline “Carrie” Clark (not that it matters). There are two conflicting theories for blast furnaces being named after women; one is it was a continuation of the common custom of naming ships for women, and the other is that they were named for women because both were “unpredictable, contrary and hard to handle.” I think the first theory is safer.

Carrie was only one of a long line of blast furnaces, each producing 1,000 to 1,250 tons of iron daily. Besides the size of the operation, one of the things that the fascinating tour drove home was the dangerous conditions under which the workers toiled. As we were on the tour, a long coal train went by and then stopped. The sound of the train compressing on itself, hundreds of yards away, was loud enough to stop the tour guide’s conversation. The map shows, the RR tracks around the blast furnaces in their heyday; there were dozens of trains every hour, taking coal and iron ore in and iron out. The noise was horrific, and a large percentage of workers retired deaf.  

When something jammed, which was not uncommon, a man dressed in leather underwear and asbestos overalls would have to climb up a ladder, a hundred feet in the air, to unstick it. It was dangerous work. As sort of an aside, when I first went to work as a carpenter, Skillsaw safety guards were coming into use, and it was not uncommon to see older carpenters with a missing finger or two. As a further aside, when I was first given a job requiring a Skillsaw, I was taught how to override the safety, a practice I gave up after seeing all the missing fingers. End asides.

The Carrie Blast furnace was the first museum – using the term very loosely – we saw on our trip. The unexpectedly delightful California Trail Interpretive Center, 15 minutes west of Elko, Nevada, was the last. Between 1841 and 1869, up to 250,000 people sold their belongings, bought and packed wagons, and set out to walk 2,000 miles west. The California Trail Interpretive Center gives an excellent accounting of that almost impossible journey in which about ten percent of the travelers died. Both left me with the same impression – probably augmented by my COVID – for most of human history, for most people, life has been very rough. What we, today, would probably regard as impossibly rough.

I consider it a bad day when Lewis Hamilton didn’t win a race, but for most people throughout history, a bad day was when their wife and child died during childbirth or their husband who supported them was killed at work. It’s nice to remember that when Hamilton doesn’t win.

Michele and I know an extraordinary number of artists from Pittsburgh, and I don’t know why. At first, I thought it was because Pittsburgh is an art town with a higher-than-average number of artists per capita, and I had a theory as to why, but it isn’t, and the theory is a theory for a phenomenon that doesn’t seem to exist. What does exist, however, is an astounding permission wall of graffiti behind the Carrie Blast furnace.

I was only in Pittsburgh for three days – Michele for two days. – and I really don’t have an overall impression. We had planned to fly into Pittsburgh, see Michele’s cousins, stay with friends in Baltimore, visit Washington DC, and then drive back to Pittsburgh through West Virginia. A great plan, but I caught COVID and spent our shortened Pittsburgh time in a hotel room. Consequently, we didn’t really see Pittsburgh.

Where could one settle more pleasantly than in one’s home. Cicero

We got home yesterday, and it feels great. Seeing Precious Mae, sleeping in our own beddy-bye (with a very cuddlesome Precious Mae), and showering in our own shower are underappreciated joys.

I think that I am over COVID, although I’m still exhausted with periodic coughing fits and a runny nose. Getting here has been a bitch, basically seven straight days of driving, although some of the days were pretty short because of my COVID.