Plus, Subtract: Another Holiday Posting

Thanksgiving. It’s not my favorite holiday (that’s Halloween), and I don’t especially care for turkey. But there are a few pluses. It’s technically still fall, and in Seattle that means overcast, a vaporous layer of rain, and a moderate temperature (fueling my over-arching thesis that Seattle is a ‘moderate town’). I appreciate these fall-like symptoms because it encourages my apartment-loving self to stay in, stare out the window, and decompress after months of intense study. The staying-in is the second plus.

But this morning I went out. My coffee-maker broke months ago, so I depend on the half dozen cafes within three blocks to provide my quota of caffeine. Luckily, Tully’s doesn’t close for holidays. I feel bad for the girls working there, but pity isn’t the right word, not after passing the mentally handicapped men and women lined up outside my apartment, interrupted by a row of pigeons. This strip of 2nd Ave always makes me feel like a German forced to pass through the ghetto during the late 30s. I don’t feel so pompous about it though. Call me sentimental, but I feel bad. Guilty. And how do I make up for this on our one day of the year where we say ‘thank you’ more mechanically than the rest of the year? I gave a guy a PBR on my way home from the liquor store.

There is another plus. The city’s emptied. I imagine many went home to Eugene or Santa Cruz to see mom and dad. I don’t meet many people living in Seattle who are from Seattle, so that would account for the vacancy. There are others, though, and in Pioneer Square, there will be a line of others to get a free turkey dinner on a paper plate. I know it’s cliché to default to poverty as a topic on Thanksgiving, but it’s not a cliché when it’s so in your face. Even the bully seems to transcend his bullyness when he’s got your collar wrapped up in his fist. A bully, like poverty, is more easily identified from a distance. His swagger. Their dragging. But up close, it’s as real as the pile of vomit the pigeon was eating this morning on Virginia. It’s hard to be objective about a pile of vomit (gross!). And that probably contributes to my own increasingly hermetic lifestyle (that and the piles of papers I still haven’t graded): for all this city’s moderateness, there is a real slump in the equilibrium. And every time I leave my place, that slump stares at me and asks for change I don’t have. I could be a hard-ass about it, and think, “tough rocks.” The problem is, they are tough. Subtract a few variables from my life and I’d be out there with them. Saying ‘thank you’ with a little more desperation in my voice.