Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving Day found me walking Bobby in the stroller in hopes that he'd fall asleep for a much-needed nap. The sweet kid—once he was strapped in, he turned and said "Where are we going?"

"To the Land of Nod," I wanted to answer, but instead mumbled something about finding a store to buy something.

"Will there be treats?" he asked. Well, in a manner of speaking ...

I took the customary route down Eighth Avenue toward Windsor Terrace, as I had so many times last winter, when he was just turning three and we were still hoping to maintain a regular nap schedule. Within a block, the rain had started; it was a sign of Bobby's fatigue that he let me put on the rain cover without a fight. A quarter-mile later, he was out. I gently adjusted his hands on his lap, pulled his coat closed around his throat, and put on the iPod.

How many hours have I spent pushing sleeping children in strollers? When Bobby was little (littler, that is), Amy and I would take him with us on epic walks—to Brooklyn Heights and back, or home across the Brooklyn Bridge from the West Village; once, all the way to Park Slope from the Upper West Side. He'd awake, shift, ask for a snack and a drink, fall asleep, awake; it was the closest he came to the car trip experience, given our lack of a car. Now, with Lulu in the picture, it doesn't happen as often. Our family outings stay closer to home and revolve around more frequent breaks. When I do head out for longer adventures with Bobby, he's usually on foot (though he does often fall asleep on the subway on the way home from the Museum of Natural History, and I ride out to the end of the line at Coney Island and back with his little blond head on my arm and his legs drawn up against the bulkhead).

But now and then, when all else has failed, and it's clear he's not going to make it through a long day on too little sleep, we saddle up the Maclaren like old times. I lock my aging back into position and settle into a comfortable cadence, and let my thoughts drift along the quiet afternoon sidewalks lined with brownstone, brick, and the low stone walls of Prospect Park.

Light at first, the rain soon increased, soaking through the backs of my second-newest leather gloves and pattering on the hood of my almost-waterproof coat. Most shops were closed, and the few people I saw were hustling steaming dishes from parked cars up stoops to open doors. Years ago, I would have found the scenario unbearably lonely; but really, some degree of melancholy has always been instrumental in making Thanksgiving my favorite holiday. I've spent the day with my parents and sister only once in the past two decades; other years found me catering parties for other people, or eating a cold plate under a bus shelter, or driving alone from San Francisco to Flagstaff. More recently, it's been a time of celebration with my new family and our closest friends, but I still find time each year for solitary meditation on the people and places far away, and those closer at hand, who make my life what it is. Not least of all, the scrappy 45-pound monster riding oblivious in front of me.

On this particular Thanksgiving, my ambulatory idyll was marred by the re-opened hole in the heel of my otherwise waterproof shoes. Shoo Goo, my ass ... it was only a matter of time before the entire sock was soaked with cold water. After a mile or two without a peep from my passenger, I finally sought a cozy café for shelter. A fifteen-minute walk brought me to my first option: closed. I tried a nearby bar, then another: both closed. I considered the nearby house of a neighbor, whose visit the previous evening had been partly responsible for Bobby's late night, but thought better of it; the couple were argumentative at the best of times, and there were already a few holiday-related dramas simmering. Finally, we made it to the Tea Lounge—the good old Tea Lounge, haven for mommy's groups, book clubs, laptopping students and breastfeeding hippies. I hung up my coat to dry, parked Bobby in a quiet corner, and lowered myself into a spring-shot couch for a cup of much-needed coffee.

I'd brought an old New Yorker with me just in case, but the book I'd left at home would have been more appropriate: The Places In Between, Rory Stewart's memoir of his solo walk across Afghanistan in January 2002. Between suspicious villagers, Taliban sympathizers, brutal terrain, and inclement weather, Stewart endures days on end of danger and hardship—and for what? It's never exactly clear. A Scot and former member of the British foreign service, he has a deep knowledge and appreciation for south Asian culture, history, and archaeology; having completed similar treks across most of the region, he's also clearly a big walker. But the decisions he makes are more foolhardy and reckless than brave, and the phrase "death wish" is never far from the reader's mind. The arbitrariness of it all would be highly frustrating, except for those moments when a sense of deeper purpose resonates from beyond the wet clothing, mountaintop whiteouts, and intestinal illness ... "My pack was still heavy, but I felt with the familiar motion of my muscles confidence and ease returning." It comes down to the Zen of motion, the mindfulness of each step obliterating more abstract concerns, the individual self becoming one with "the desert—the night sky—the feudal castles standing back—the single lance of the Jam minaret in its narrow valley—the international dimensions of the war—the snow."

Seventeen years ago, I'd set off on my own dilettante's version of Stewart's trip: a ten-day jaunt through Morocco, accompanied by two fellow Americans I'd met in Marrakech. I'd phoned home before leaving, as had Stewart; like his, my parents assumed it would be the last they ever heard from me. At the time, I scoffed at their bourgeois concern. I'd spent a year honing my expatriate chops in a dismal apartment in Madrid, and thought it only natural that I follow still further in the footsteps of Burroughs and Bowles. Now, of course, I can more fully understand what it must feel like for a parent to say goodbye to a child leaving for destinations unknown. Thanksgiving Day at the Tea Lounge, Bobby hadn't the least idea where he was sleeping, and had no reason to need to know; I had his tender life safe in my hands. But the day would come soon enough when his journeys were for him alone, far beyond my ability to protect him.

Having read my magazine from cover to cover, I was eager to get home and peel that wet sock off my clammy foot. But first, I sat just a while longer, staring into my son's slack face, lips slightly parted, dark circles under his eyes from his bedtime shenanigans, his chest slowly rising and falling inside his twenty-dollar Old Navy parka.