Showing posts with label Thanksgiving. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Thanksgiving. Show all posts

25 November 2021

A Fowl Holiday

 The other day, my friend Beverly told me she's going to spend today with her kids and grandkids on Staten Island.  I'm going "with bird in tow," she said.

I asked whether she'd planned to use a tow truck to drag a turkey across the Verrazano Bridge.  "That sounds cruel!" exclaimed.

Plus, it would definitely lead his fellow feathered friends in a fowl mood. (I couldn't resist that one!)





Happy Thanksgiving!

27 November 2015

Thanksgiving Post-Prandial

I am sure that the ride I took yesterday didn't burn off nearly as many calories as I consumed during Thanksgiving dinner.   I suppose most people could say that the bike ride, walk, run, swim, skate or whatever they took (if, indeed, they took any of those) after their holiday repasts could say  .the same.  

Anyway, yesterday was a lovely day all the way around, from the beginning.  As I left to go to my friends' place, I was greeted by this:




The window is in a building two doors down from where I live.  I had seen the cat once before; if I do say so myself, she knows she's looking at a friend when she sees me.  Were there not a screen (as there was yesterday) or windowpane between us, I'd be stroking and possibly feeding her.  I'm sure she knows that.

What's striking about that cat is that her body is white and she has patches of colors on her head and rear--a reversal of what one normally sees. (Both of my cats have colorful bodies and patches of white.)  One of these days, I'll ask her human how he or she found her.

After spending the afternoon with food and friends (possibly in that order), I snuck out for a ride before dessert.  I tried to capture, on my cell phone, a tree in near-perfect late-fall sunset hue arched over a street.  What I got instead was the beginning of the sunset.  Oh well.




From there, I rambled over to the Worlds' Fair Marina prominade, which rims Flushing Bay from LaGuardia Airport to the Flushing Bridge, a span that provides some of the most necropolitic vistas in this city. Just east of the airport, I chanced upon this schizophrenic scene:



Then I went back for dessert, which added even more calories than I burned off.  But, hey, it was Thanksgiving.  And the food and company were great.

After that, I rode to visit a friend and co-worker in the hospital.  He's in a coronary care unit, where eating isn't allowed, so I couldn't bring any of the food I'd shared with my friends.  It was sad, but it showed me a few things for which I'm thankful. 

P.S. No Black Friday for me!

26 November 2015

A Thanksgiving Greeting

Being the person I am, I often think about roles.  That means, of course, I think of role-reversal.  So it probably wouldn't surprise you to know that I particularly enjoyed finding this:


Vintage postcard.  Posted on Bike Topeka



The poor turkey!  Someone's making him (I'm assuming that if he's Tom, he's male!) do all of the work.  Then he's going to be killed and stuffed by people who are going to stuff themslves with him, the stuffing and every other kind of food you can think of!

If that doesn't turn you into a vegetarian, I don't know what will.  (Then again, I'm not saying that you should become one.  A chacun son gout.

All right.  I know I'm not supposed to use French on Thanksgiving, the most American of all holidays.  But even Francophobes will, I suspect, forgive me this year in the wake of the Paris attacks.

Anyway...I wish you all a Happy Thanksgiving.  And, if you don't celebrate this holiday, I hope this day is joyful and fulfilling.  Finally, to my readers:  Thank you.

22 November 2012

Working Up An Appetite

How's this for a new category:  an "appetite-enhancement bike ride"?  Apparently, such a ride was organized for today in Sacramento, CA.

Sacramento "Appetite-Enhancement Ride"


I took such a ride--on Tosca, of course-- after family members and I called each other and before I went to my friend Millie's house. It's not the first time my Thanksgiving has followed such a pattern.  Also, not for the first time, I felt that neither the ride nor the day with Millie and her other friends and family was long enough.  

Who said Thanksgiving Day was a time for grueling centuries (although I'm sure some cyclists did them today!) or dietary restraint?

Somehow I don't think these guys took an appetite-enhancement ride:

Stephanie's (see below) boyfriend Tony, his son  Jason and Stephanie's son Stephen.



For that matter, I don't think these folks did, either:

Millie (on left) with her husband John, her friend Joanne, her daughters Stephanie and Lisa, and  Lisa's friend Louis.





24 November 2011

Giving Thanks

I know I'll have to drop whatever pretense I have of being a hipster who's full of post-modern irony.  But I do indeed have reasons to give thanks.  Not least among them is that I didn't have to travel yesterday or today, and that I still got to share a Thanksgiving dinner with people I love.  And I got to ride a bit before going there--on a really nice bike.  I know there's more, but those are certainly ample reasons for giving thanks!

23 November 2011

Up The Col Du Galibier: The Day Before Thanksgiving


In the last moment of my life, I saw the day before Thanksgiving...

I'd just pedaled a few strokes around the virage; a bed of wildflowers turned, in an instant, into a glacial field.  The sun was so bright it turned into the kind of liquid haze through which dreams skip and float along with the words that make sense only in those dreams.


It was noon.  We were all lined up--the boys on one side, the girls on the other--to leave school for the day, the next day, and the three days that would follow.  For some reason, when I was a kid, that was always my favorite moment of the year.  Even the seemingly-capricious discipline of the Carmelite nuns who taught in our school could not make that moment less happy.   They could cast a pall over the day before Christmas Eve, over Holy Thursday.  Whether or not they loaded us down with homework, they left us in such a mood that Christmas, even if we got the gifts we hoped for, seemed more like a truce, and Easter was just too holy of a day to really consider as a vacation, even if we were home for the week that followed.  

But noon on the day before Thanksgiving always seemed like the most carefree moment of the year.  In most years, it began the last interlude of Fall; the lights of Christmas only accented the darkness that consumed ever-larger parts of the days that would follow.  In that moment, on the day before Thanksgiving, one could still see the last flickerings of the autumnal blaze that burned green leaves into the colors of the sunset.  Somewhere along the way, they turned as yellow and, for a few days, as bright as the sunlight that filled the air around the mountain I was climbing on my bike.


It was just about noon; I would soon be at the peak of le Col du Galibier, one of the most famous climbs on the Tour de France.  From there, I would have a long effortless ride to the valley.  In the meantime, each pedal stroke would become more arduous.  I'd been pedaling all morning, but even more important was the altitude:  I was more than a mile and a half above sea level.  The air is thinner, and even though my breath steamed as I puffed up that mountain on that July morning, the sun burned through the layers of sun screen I'd lathered on my arms and face.  


Bells rang.  Dismissal?  Or the cows in the herd down the mountain?  I stopped for a drink and one of the crepes I'd packed into my bag.  I took a bite and a gulp.  


You're free.  I wasn't sure of whether I was hearing that.  Perhaps I was giddy from the thin mountain air.  Yes, you're free.  But I wasn't hearing it:  It was being told--or, more precisely, communicated--to that child who was being dismissed from school on the day before Thanksgiving.  You can go now.  What are they talking about?  Who's "they"?


You don't have to do this again.  I'd never heard that before, certainly not in those days.  What did that mean?  What won't I have to do again?  Climb this mountain?  Go to school?


Down the Col du Galibier, through the Val de Maurienne, as the eternal winter of that mountaintop turned into the hottest day of summer in the valley, my mind echoed.  What, exactly, wouldn't I have to do again?


Near the end of that day, I reached St. Jean de Maurienne, just a few kilometers from Italy.  There, I would see the stranger who, inadvertently, caused me to see that I could follow no other course but the one that my life has taken since then.  A year later, I would move out of the apartment I'd been sharing with Tammy; about a year after that, I would change my name and begin my treatments.

25 November 2010

Giving Thanks on a Quick Morning Ride

I heard it was going to rain today.  So I tried to sneak in an early ride:  just a few miles on Tosca.  It felt about ten degrees colder than it was when I pedaled home last night after teaching in the technical institute.  And yesterday was at least that much colder than the day before.  At least, it seemed that way, for the wind blew hard enough to strip nearly all of the remaining leaves from wizening branches. 


One of the things that amazes me about cycling is that, even after all of these years, I can ride down some street I've pedaled dozens of times before and a moment, an image, will imprint itself in my mind.  Just south of LaGuardia Airport, in East Elmhurst, an elderly black woman stepped, with dignity if not grace, from behind a door on which dark green paint bubbled and the wood splintered and cracked into ashen hues like the ones on her coat, which she expects, or at least hopes, wil get her through another winter.


She is probably thankful for even that.  You might say that I am, too, for being able to ride by and see that, and to be able to ride home, then to Millie's house for Thanksgiving dinner.


I hope yours was at least as good as mine.