Of course as a nation this Thanksgiving we can all give thanks that the reckless reign of King George is coming to an end. It still doesn’t seem all that real to me. I’m hoping that it will sink in after the first of the year when Madame Speaker is sworn in and the balances finally start to get checked and the checks finally start to get balanced. Just imagine if those guys had actually won the midterm? Who knows where their magical thinking would have led the nation? Like the nutjob revolutionaries in Woody Allen’s Bananas I could imagine shadow President Cheney decreeing that all Democrats had to wear their underwear on the outside so he could keep track of how often we changed them.

I still feel anxious for the long-term survival of the planet but I am a little less sure that Cheney is going to nuke everything southeast of the Mediterranean before his term is out.

So, for the Democratic Miracle in the year 2006 I will forever be thankful.

However personally, Thanksgiving has always been a hard one for me. Like most of us I have the platonic ideal of Thanksgiving in my head and yet the reality almost always disappoints. Ever since my mom died when I was sixteen my little family of my sister, my father and me wandered the earth every November, adopted, for the evening, by various friends. When I was married we had a couple of good ones, where all our single friends and friends with smaller kitchens descended on our house for a day-long feast. Now that it’s just the kids and me, a single dad like my dad, we again get invited to eat with gracious, loving friends. I appreciate it. I appreciate it more than they know. But a part of me also wishes that I could a fill my own long table, just for one night, with people who shared my blood.

Maybe I should start making more babies. That way, by the time I’m 70, I’d finally be able to populate a banquet.