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THANKSGIVING AND REFLECTION
by David G. Duggan ©
www.virtueonline.org
November 30, 2024
On Wednesday, I received a ton of birthday wishes on Facebook, most from people I've never met. A birthday the day before Thanksgiving is both a blessing and a curse: a blessing because it gives you another chance to give thanks for where you are and where you have been. Trips around the sun are memorable: we judge what has happened in past years and make inevitable comparisons to where we were. But they also remind us of where we had hoped we would be. Perhaps it is just me, but the dreams of a callow youth have been dashed on the shoals of reality. No ascension to the bench to join the ranks of Hand, Pound, Cardozo and Schaefer, but the Sisyphean task of rolling that rock up the hill of justice. I am grateful that I have been able to do this without a net, so to speak.
The curse of a birthday the day before Thanksgiving comes from the fact that whatever celebration might occur is overshadowed by the turkey, gravy, yams and pumpkin pie. At least I like one of those. Regardless, it is an anomaly: happening once every six years or so, but with leap years, the progression is imprecise. There are two such events which have stuck in my memory bank however, and they curiously both involve my younger sister. Early in the morning of November 27, 1985, having kissed my son and spouse goodbye the night before, I drove a rental van from an overnight stay in Briarcliff Manor, NY to my spouse's parents to pick up my bicycle and a pair of skis I'd bought in Switzerland many years before. I headed west to Chicago, the city of my upbringing, to start a new life shorn of the pressures of life in the Apple where professional dejection merged with personal turmoil to create a toxic environment from which I needed to escape. Midway, I stopped at my sister's house in Ohio. Her toddler daughter lit up on my arrival. After a Thanksgiving repast with my sister and her family, I pushed on and arrived in Chicago in time to have two friends help me off-load the van which I had navigated over 900 miles.
Then 17 years later, single and having survived a federal investigation into advice I'd given a client, I drove 800 miles east to my sister's vacation home in North Carolina, coincidentally the state of my birth. My parents arrived and my sister's family had grown to include three adolescent children. It was a reunion of sorts of those gathered in Ohio with the added benefit of sunshine and warmer temperatures than that which the states bordering the Great Lakes endure in late November. An autumn in North Carolina is devoutly to be desired.
The point is simply this: with a birthday that largely coincides with Thanksgiving, I am grateful still to be here, sharing the story of a man who reached for the stars, yet grabbed a cross on the way down. It is that cross on which I have hung my life.
David Duggan is an attorney. He lives in Chicago and writes occasional pieces for Virtueonline. He is also VOL's attorney of record.
