Thanksgiving and the Unexpected Kindness of People
Eight years as a solo immigrant in the USA, and eight years of families opening their homes and hearts to me
I arrived in the United States of America as a 22 year old. Flush with an ambition backed by a willingness to work extraordinarily hard, and emboldened by passion and a capacity for warmth and love learned through childhood. And well, that’s about all I had to show for myself. There were no distant relatives to lean on for support. There weren’t any savings to fall back on. And I certainly didn’t have any of that New York toughness etched into my DNA. Fresh out of college in a land far away, one suitcase in tow, I was starting a new life, from scratch. I’d read about the stories of immigrants arriving on ships, crossing past the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, and stepping foot onto their journey of the American Dream. And now that energy, from a story written many lifetimes ago, reverberated within me too.
When you’re young and naive, without the guidance of a parent or mentor, it is hope and imagination, rather than courage and artfulness, that tend to lead you through the empty space of what’s next. There are turbulent and murky waters ahead, and you keep swimming. You hit a rock, or three. You figure how to hit less rocks, shrewdly dodge branches and logs, and keep swimming. Eventually, if you persist, and with a little bit of luck and string of good decisions, you find yourself upon a raft or boat going in the right direction. That boat for me was the people who came into my life. The miracle of how this happened was never more starkly on display than when it was the time of year for Thanksgiving. I didn’t even know what it was that first year when it came around, on the last Thursday of November.
Thanksgiving, for those who aren’t familiar, is a national holiday in the United States (and several other countries). In 1863, President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a national day of thanksgiving to be celebrated, and then in 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued a proclamation designating the fourth Thursday in November as Thanksgiving Day. It’s a somewhat different kind of holiday though. The entire country, apart from its motorways and airports, basically comes to a standstill in the days leading up to it, and then on Thanksgiving Day itself, relatives tend to congregate from far and wide into one family member’s home for an afternoon of feasting, football and socialising.
Several months into my first year living in New York, I was told there was a holiday coming up. And that no one would be working for five days straight, Wednesday through to Sunday. Like a good New Yorker fresh in the city, I of course planned to use the days off to work or party, likely both. Yet, no one else was really planning to party. And my hyper-competitive office effectively went MIA. Meanwhile, I had been seeing a girl, Julia, for about month, and she called in to ask what I was doing for the break. “Apparently, nothing,” I said. “Aw, come to our house, it’s Thanksgiving!” she replied. We had met at a SoHo nightclub four weeks ago. She was really speeding things up, I thought. What to do…. Well, I had a friend from back home staying with me for the week and I asked if he could come along too. Surely, that would let her know I was interested, yet take the pressure down a bit. “Of course, bring him!” she replied. So, we went to their house. The day before Thanksgiving, we took the Metro North train upstate from Grand Central Station to Connecticut, and she picked us up at the local station. I had been invited to their house for three days, and had no idea what I was getting myself into, truly.
From the moment I arrived in their home, I felt like a member of the family. I met her mom, who showed me around the house and sat me down for a cheerful coffee and chat. I met her brother, who eyed me a bit suspiciously from time to time (to be expected). The stepdad was out golfing. That evening, the six of us sat down for dinner. Mom, stepdad, brother, Julia, my friend and I, I who still felt awfully awkward. They had a chef who had prepared a meal and as we sat around the dining table, the family started asking me questions about where I was from, what I was doing in New York, and I tried my best to politely (still awkwardly) ask them about their lives. The usual get-know-each-other speak. Yet, it never once felt like an interrogation. Instead, it felt like they were sincerely interested in me, without judgment. I was sure I was saying things out of left field given the cultural differences. Yet, here I was, sitting in their home, evidently sleeping with the daughter/sister, having come into each others lives just a month prior, a young kid with a blank slate from the other side of the world, and the kindness and fairness these people showed me on the eve of Thanksgiving Day… I just didn’t know what to make of it. It was too good to be true.
And it was. That night, Julia, my friend, and I were still watching a movie while the rest of the family had long gone into bed. By this point of the evening, we were a solid few bottles of red wine into the affair, and Julia had apparently had just one too many. Or so my crisp white shirt was to find out when her glass of red wine fell all over it. My one nice white shirt. The one I had brought especially for Thanksgiving to impress the family, with the Polo horse on it and all. Well, we all took that as a sign to go to bed ourselves. By late morning on the next day, the actual day of Thanksgiving when the relatives would start arriving, there was a new white shirt perfectly steamed and laid out by the bed for me to change into. Julia’s brother had seen to that. And my own shirt was currently being cleaned, or so I was told, because Julia’s mom had seen to it.
What was going on here? I’ll tell you what. The spirit of Thanksgiving. When Julia invited me out for the holiday, my assumption was that she wanted to spend more time with me and for me to meet her family. And in some ways, ways which I was grateful for, she was. Yet, the main reason, I couldn’t fully understand at the time, was not altogether personal, it was altogether about being all together. It was simply Thanksgiving, and what it symbolised to her, to her family, and as I would come to learn over the next eight years, to much of the United States of America. A time of bringing people together, of caring for others without prejudice, of making those left out, feel the door opened.
I recall the poem, The New Colossus, by Emma Lazarus, that is etched on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty for new immigrants into the USA to see upon their arrival.
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. "Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
A tear comes to my eye. If only for a few days, these kind, privileged American people were lifting a lamp beside their golden door, for me.
Now, by this point you may be thinking, “That’s a nice little fairytale story, but it’s not representative of daily life.” And I began thinking quite the same, to be frank. As the years and experience of living in New York began to stack up, I came to understand for better or worse, that the more competitive, the faster the pace, the more opportunity at stake, the less kindness seemed to be present. In general, people just seemed to be too busy surviving their own battles and absorbed in the self interest of their own worlds, to choose to open much space for others unless it served their own interests. Riding the train of progress and growth meant constant (and larger) transactional wins, and arbitrary kindness apparently doesn’t pay that well. I came to understand that the overall environment was not conducive to that sort of approach to daily life. Yet, there were people who did make the intentional space to be kind. And they weren’t doing so to satisfy some need within themselves. Over the years, I would meet a host of individuals and families from a wide variety of walks of life who oozed unsolicited kindness, at least some of the time. There was a cashier at my local Duane Reade pharmacy in SoHo who I came to rely upon for a smile and laugh, no matter how heavy the day had been. There were restaurant hosts who would give us a table as walk-ins, even though the place had been fully booked for weeks. There were moms at our office kitchen, tennis sparing partners and extraordinarily wealthy individuals, all of whom were surviving (and thriving) in their lives in New York City, yet also making time and space to be kind. Unexpected kindness. This was just who they were. Nay, with the pressures of New York, I concluded this was who they had chosen to be. It wasn’t an every day thing, mind you, yet I learned to cultivate these type of relationships, so it became a more-often-than-not thing. I sought to be in the lives of people with these values, and to be able to pay it forward myself with others. If I strayed off that path, into the mountains of success and material wealth, there was always Thanksgiving every November to remind me of what else was just as important to a good life.
And as I grew into my identity in New York, year after year, the magic of Thanksgiving continued to play out in its own unique way. One year, when I truly was planning to hunker down in the city during the break, a friend and his sister invited me over last minute to their little apartment to help make the turkey for a get together they were organising for fellow hunkering downers. We all ended up celebrating together into the late hours of the night. Another year, a colleague from work invited me to fly out with him to his family farm in Vermont, introduced me to his parents and brother, showed me my room, lent me his car and said, “Enjoy yourself for the week.” And the final year, at the end of my eight years in New York, as I was deep in the throws of starting my own business and too busy and too obsessed, having recently parted ways with my girlfriend and declined several invitations to travel out of town, and when it truly did seem like this would be the year I would spend Thanksgiving alone, I met a family and their daughter while eating by myself at my go-to restaurant Souen on Prince Street (sadly since closed). The day, that day was just two days away. After a ten-minute chat, they of course asked me, “So, what are your Thanksgiving plans?” When my response yielded nothing of significance, I was promptly invited out to their cousins house in upstate New York. And just like that, as it happened in my first year when Julia taught me about the blessing of Thanksgiving as a newfound immigrant to the USA, I found myself taking the train from Grand Central to the local station upstate, where mother, father and daughter picked me up and drove me into the comfort of their world of family and friends.