The cousins lock it up for Thanksgiving grace

We were down in Baltimore for Thanksgiving with Amy’s family (parents, two sisters, our kids’ cousins, Great Grandma, aunts and cousins, plus pets) and I certainly felt like we were sitting atop a mountain of things for which we are, indeed, very thankful. This past year has had some significant deaths, friends divorcing, etc. and we felt very grateful for the chance to gather together. Big knock on wood. I even ran the Charm City Turkey Trot 5K with Amy’s sister and finished ahead of some 9 year olds wearing polkadot tights (this is a riff on the fact that an increasing percentage of FB friends’ posts are related to Beach Body workouts and/or their marathon/IronMan/5K endeavors).

Dear John…I am a vegan

I'll have some of that gravy on my tofurkey

Now in week 6 or so of the soft-core vegan lifestyle I picked up from my friends who have taken the red pill and read The China Study, I found plenty to talk about with Amy’s moderately diet, health and fitness-obsessed family. There is something of a modest coming-out narrative around saying you are eating vegan and might just keep it up for the long haul. While I am quick to point out it is just for my own health, and not a political statement, I definitely sense how this comes across as radical in some circumstances. Probably most of all with young Miss A., who I think is threatened by this unaccountable change in Dad’s behavior and wants to know why–and whether she needs to drink crappy almond milk herself. This is a girl who has the seatbelt reflex deeply ingrained…if switching out cheese for chreese (I’m just throwing that in b/c it is a veganism that grosses me out) is what you are supposed to do, and she’s not doing it, it’s like she is dangling out of the car by her knees while I ride alongside her in a five-point restraint. Early days yet.

So far I’m down a few pounds to a post-wedding low, generally have fewer times of feeling logy or gross after meals, and am blithely continuing to eat Amy’s egg and butter-laden baked goods as part of Phase I of the long-term plan. Plus I took a vegan bye for Thanksgiving, but in a lifetime first for me did not have seconds on turkey–but yes on that Baltimore turkey accompaniment, sauerkraut.

The post-D&D memoir

I happened to finish a memoir by one of my favorite bloggers, Ta-Nehisi Coates, while I was in Baltimore. I first read TNC when he was transitioning in 2008 to being a regular blogger for The Atlantic Monthly, and (particularly from Portugal) appreciated his open, literate-but-down Black American take on the cultural and political bomb that went off with Obama’s campaign and election. The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood is his 2008 memoir of growing up in Baltimore in a complicated family situation, with an ex-Black Panther father and a mother both bent on Consciousness (i.e. African, post-slavery) as the essential path of young black boys through the menaces of growing up in America.

Reading this memoir while sitting more or less literally atop Baltimore’s Mt. White Privilege was another reminder of the blinders I have on in my travels through the earth (more so in America than abroad, probably). But one thing that I can totally identify with that TNC draws upon in conjuring up the threats he grew up with–both gangs from other neighborhoods and the existential threat of the crack age–is the dramatic scene and language of the post-Dungeons and Dragons era. The orcs surrounded him, hooded and dripping with blood, and against the dying of the light his father was a paladin who never lost faith in the ability to transform hidden/suppressed African-exiled Consciousness into a righteous sword. I think most of my close guy friends and I share a bit of this take on our history, the middle-school dynamic transposed into a battle mediated by geekily crayoned 12-sided dice.

On the flight back up to Boston we passed a few miles east of NYC. It was my first view of the Freedom Tower being constructed on the site of the World Trade Center. I have no plans to go down there but the building certainly makes the intended architectural statement of undying freedom / f***  you, we’re still here. All the way up overhead Manhattan and the Bronx I was reminded of the human impulse–whether through Olmsteadian parks, delineating with broad avenues (one of which my dad grew up on, Bronx Park East, overlooking the Bronx Zoo) suitably wild places of retreat from urbanity, or through the whole Tolkein edifice of fantasy–to define in art the lines between us and the demons, or between our base and enlightened selves.

I am really looking forward to hearing Coates talk this Tuesday at MIT about the Civil War-inspired novel that he’s working on, probably in the presence of the two major dudes who are on the MIT writing faculty: Junot Diaz and Joe Haldeman. Haldeman wrote The Forever War, for f***’s sake, something I read at age 12 or so and never forgot, and is still going. And Diaz, who busted into the consciousness of every New Yorker reader with his stories in the 90s, is the Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which is sort of the next level of what you can do from a geeky childhood with orcs: an amazing book that has stayed with me these past four years since it came out. More on this later this week.