Nevertheless, thanks

I have no clear memories of my family’s celebration of Thanksgiving in 1963. But I am sure our meal was eaten in an atmosphere of anxiety and concern.

President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated the previous Friday, and his funeral had been on Monday. The assassin himself had been shot to death on the Saturday between the two days. Our nation was still in a state of shock, and the future seemed more uncertain than it had seemed just a week before. The new president, Lyndon Johnson, was a very different person than Kennedy had been.

I was in the first semester of my sophomore year in college at the time. I cannot say for sure that classes were cancelled during the week before Thanksgiving Day, but they must have been. I probably went home earlier than I’d planned to.

My family, including myself at the time, were staunchly Republican. I am certain that any of us old enough to vote in 1960 had voted for Richard Nixon.

Yet I am also certain we all shared in the sense of loss and sorrow that pervaded the nation and the world: the President of the United States had been murdered in cold blood in front of thousands of well-wishers. The tragedy was a national one, affecting us all. And although I am sure political operatives somewhere quickly went to work figuring out how make the assassination work to their group’s advantage, I remember those days as ones of national lament and loss.

Sadly, such would not be the case today should our president be assassinated. Before the body turned cold, people would be publicizing their opinions on what the death meant and spinning that death to their purposes. With no filters such as the news organizations provided in the 1963, even people whose opinions are not worth a nickel would mount all the platforms they could find to tell the world what they thought. A lot of it would not be pretty. The last thing they’d want is for our nation to mourn our collective loss, to come together to grieve.

Though I cannot remember the details, I am sure our family celebrated Thanksgiving. We had a lot to be thankful for in 1963, and we knew it. How could we not be thankful?

Abraham Lincoln proclaimed the first official Thanksgiving Day in 1863, in the midst of our terrible Civil War. It was to be a day of remembrance for those who had died in that war and for the widows and orphans their deaths had created. Give thanks, so that you remember the price many paid to allow you to live the life you are living.

We are in a tough spot in our land and in the world in 2023. I am convinced that it is an even tougher spot than the one we were in 60 years ago. The post World War II order that benefited many and that seemed unshakeable threatens to collapse. Democracy is under attack around the world and here at home by powerful forces that would enthrone dictators in its place. We are being divided one from another by forces we cannot easily see or resist. Fear feeds distrust, hatred, racism, and sexism.

Yet, I will give thanks. Thanks for those who respect the rule of law, for those who work to make that law fair for everyone, for those who serve and advocate for the disenfranchised and marginalized, for those whose labors in a thousand fields keep us safe, fed, housed, and free. For those who are driven not by fear of the future, but by hope for it.

I will give thanks for those who have different notions than I do about how to make our democracy work better for all Americans. I am an American, and they are, too; we just see things differently. Americans are like that.

Giving thanks to a “god” or “gods” is problematical for many of us in 2023. Whether or not we can do that, I suggest we simply give thanks for one another, for all the “anothers” who are Americans with us, even if we do so just for a moment. It would be a moment of unity that might just change for the better the way we treat one another the rest of the year.

Velveeta Vandalism

Recently reported in the Cleveland Plain Dealer’s Police Blotter:

Vandalism: Bradford Lane (Avon, OH)

A resident called police at 11:55 a.m. Sept. 18 to report that an unknown person had put cheese on his mailbox overnight. There was no further information at the time of the report.

No further information! No further information? What?

Inquiring minds want to know. So many questions in search of answers…

What kind of cheese?…packaged or naked?…Velveeta (is that cheese, really?) or Pule (look it up)?…are there any likely suspects?…was there any follow-up investigation?…and of course, did the police respond at all to this call?

I came across the blotter about the time Hamas attacked Israel, so my first reaction was, How trivial!

In this world of enormous hurt, who would call the cops because they found cheese on top of their mailbox?

But then I wondered: Does cheese left atop a mailbox by an unknown perpetrator mean something sinister? Is it a threat of some kind that other people—more in-the-know people-than-I—understand, maybe a message from some domestic Hamas aimed at an unsuspecting Avon-er?

Turns out, cheese on the mailbox is a thing, though apparently a relatively small thing. My in-depth Google search found the earliest recorded incident to be from February of 2012 when someone posted a photo somewhere captioned, “Slice of cheese left on top of a mailbox on Broadway.” Obviously, a theatrical act.

Nothing else came up until March of 2022 when someone on Reddit complained that they had found poor quality cheese on their in-laws’ mailbox. Ten years of after the first incident, quality had become an issue, and being concerned about the quality of in-laws’ cheese does merit attention. There is hope for peace in our world.

Another possibility: placing cheese on top of a US Postal Service-approved mail box may run counter to U.S. Postal Code Regulations. I have heard that it is illegal to put anything into a mail box that hasn’t come through true U. S. mails, so cheese on top of it may fall into that category of criminal activity.

After much pondering, my grand conclusions to the matter are these:

1. It appears that finding unexpected cheese on top of your mailbox is not unheard of. But as to what it means, or signifies, I, like the police, have no further information.

2. If the unnamed Bradford Lane resident called the Avon police to report a harmless incident because they wanted to get their story on the Plain Dealer’s Police Blotter thereby jump-starting their career as an influencer, I wish them all success. But they’ll have to come clean with who they are.

3. Calling leaving cheese on someone’s mailbox an act of vandalism seems a bit extreme, but the crime had to be stuffed into some category to seem worth reporting.

4. It was good for my spirit to mull over so trivial an event in the midst of the truly awful things the news constantly puts before us to worry about. For example, just today the Plain Dealer reported that Jewish graves in an area cemetery had been desecrated with spray-painted swasticas. Clearly, that is vandalism of the worst kind. So I am grateful for police blotter notices that spread a wondering smile across my face. My need for such amusement increases by the moment.