Reaching Back For Some Holiday Spirit

The Holidays are looming before us and I have a confession to make about one particular Holiday. I love Thanksgiving. No doubt this is in part attributable to the fact that we are always guests on Thanksgiving, never hosts. None of that all week cleaning, all day cooking, all night cleaning up for me. Nope, I’m like the 87^th Airborne; I parachute in, fulfill my mission (in this case eat) and then move out and on to the next challenge.

Turkey with all the fixings is a nice appetizer for what, in my mind has always been the main course, apple pie. Everything else is foreplay. It may be extremely pleasant but it’s still not the point of the exercise. Apple pie is it. The perfect ending to a perfect Holiday.

It turns out my family has a long history of Thanksgivings. We almost go back to the first one. Almost but not quite. The first Parmelee, whom we refer to as “Young John,” arrived in Charlestown, Massachusetts in late spring or early summer of 1635. Young John must have been a great letter writer because his father, we call him “Grandpa John,” arrived in New Haven, Connecticut four years later.

The early Parmelees were Puritans, a source of some irony and considerable amusement to me since this particular branch of the current generation is anything but Puritan. The timing of my ancestors arrival on these shores also helps to explain my attitude toward immigration. We should have closed the borders in 1640 and kept the rest of riff-raff out, but it’s too late to change all that now. Americans who can trace their ancestry back before the Pilgrims would probably pick an earlier date.

I’m guessing that Young John had a real good sales pitch because Grandpa John arrived in July of 1639. He was already 55 years old and had outlived four wives by that point. Grandpa John was also a rather prolific fellow, having fathered 13 children among those four wives although his record at keeping them alive past infancy is, at best, spotty. Although he took another wife in Connecticut when he was almost 70, his begetting days were behind him.

Not so with Young John. The boy was 22 when he arrived in Charlestown, eventually met up with his Dad in Connecticut and they both settled in Guilford, Connecticut. Young John did his best at begetting but he never did catch his father’s record. He did pretty well though, three wives, 10 children and 74 grandchildren. Imagine their Thanksgiving.

Since then we’ve carried on down through the generations, I think I’m about 9^th or 10^th generation, and there are about as many spellings of Parmelee as there were Parmelees after the first few generations. This gives those of us who have trouble spelling a tendency toward hubris on the spelling issue since we can say, “maybe I can’t spell ‘cat’ if you spot me the ‘c’ and the ‘t’ but at least I can spell my own name and my great, great, great grandfather couldn’t even do that!”

I discovered all this when I stumbled on a website devoted to the Parmelee lineage when I was trying to find out a little about my grandfather whom I never knew. Turns out a guy in Los Angeles, a former news editor and copy editor at the Los Angeles Times, has spent 30 years compiling all this information. I sent him what little information I had and he tied me into the rest of the clan. As it happens there are a couple of United States Presidents in the family, albeit two of the worst.

But I don’t have to worry about seeing them at Thanksgiving which is the other thing I like about the Holidays in general and Thanksgiving in particular, I like all the people I get to see this time of year. To tell the truth I like them a lot. And as much as I enjoy playing Scrooge before the ghosts come to visit most of the year, comes the Holidays and I’m a little like Old Fezziwig. I delight in the spirit of the thing. Just don’t get between me and that apple pie.

The Union Forever!

Okay Maine you surprised me. You went to the polls and overrode your own legislature to take the right of marriage away from same sex couples. I thought you were so much more sensible than that. I thought you would see things the way I do; if you’re opposed to same sex marriage, don’t marry a person of the same sex. That’s simple. It’s easy to remember. You may not have entirely made up your mind about what you hope for in a spouse but you rule out anyone who has certain body parts that look pretty much like yours.

I get that there are a lot of people who feel threatened by gay marriage, but I’ve never figured out why. And I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything resembling a logical explanation either. There are those who point to the bible and say it’s prohibited there but the bible also tells us to lay off the pork chops and I don’t see any of these people trying to fire the minister who allowed the ham and bean supper in the church hall.

There are people who take the old “we’ve never done it that way here before” approach. That’s a great piece of logic that would still have us riding horses to work. You know when automobiles came along they were seen, in part, as a solution to the pollution caused by horses. Imagine the Maine Turnpike public works crews spending the whole day cleaning up road apples.

There are a lot of negative consequences from the proliferation automobiles - remember nothing causes problems like solutions. But about the only downside that I can think of as a result of the change away from the horse is we put the guys who made boot scrapers out of business.

Since my spouse is of the opposite sex and I don’t live in Maine it probably shouldn’t bother me at all but for some reason it does. So at the risk of sounding like one of those dogmatic atheists who is so strenuous in their insistence that there is no God that it becomes pretty obvious that non-belief is their religion, I’m going to make a suggestion to get all 50 states on the same page and let us worry about other things. You know, little things like two wars, a tanked economy and a health care system that isn’t a system and only works for those who are healthy.

It is time for the states, all 50 of them, to get out of the marriage business entirely.

All 50 of the 50 states are civil institutions and should recognize civil unions. Let the state of Holy Matrimony be, as it should be, the domain of religious institutions. You cover the law with a civil union you go to a religious institution to get things straightened out with the Deity. It’s a “render unto Caesar” approach that makes perfect sense to me.

This would not invalidate any existing marriage, all would automatically be recognized as Civil Unions by the states that make a distinction between Civil Union and Marriage. Whether your religious institution would recognize it is your problem, not mine. If you were married in a church I would assume you’re already covered. If not, and you wanted the sanction of religion for your union, that’s entirely between you and your clergy in the faith of your choice.

Is this idea reasonable? Definitely. Plausible? Entirely. Original? Well I can’t claim to be the only person or the first person to think of it I’m sure but it makes sense doesn’t it? Which is why I’m sure it has practically no chance. I’m sure the people who overrode the legislature would think this was somehow cheapening their marriage. And of course legislators with sense enough to do the right thing more than occasionally are in extremely short supply. But I offer it in the marketplace of ideas and you can either buy it or keep walking.