Now that I'm teaching at Columbia, surrounded by so many foreign students, I'm reminded how special, how particular, Thanksgiving is to us Americans. Our Halloween has successfully been imported to most of Europe, Japan, Hong Kong and the Phillippines, but Thanksgiving remains peculiar to us (and the Canadians who copied us in 1879 and who now celebrate it on the second Monday in October).
I remember when I was living in Florence, Italy, in my twenties I ate fish sticks and pasta with butter alone in my apartment that third Thursday in November. The foreign students I've polled have banded together to create a great ad hoc family of over-eaters.
Thanksgiving, like Valentine's Day, can be hell on us singles of small or diminishing families. It's always this frantic game of musical chairs to see who will take us in. In other years the kids and I have been invited to friends' houses and brought pies and champagne to make up for not knowing how to roast a turkey. Two years ago my then Italian girlfriend, the Martha's Stewart of Milan, flew in and exploded my kitchen with traditional and Italian stuffing (salami, chestnuts and I don't know what else added to it), her first roast turkey and all the traditional sides but all done in a way that was so exquisite it would have made Mario Batali throw himself into the East River.
This year I've sent the kids down to Georgia to be with their mom and their grandparents for the long weekend. In these pages I've recommended "Divorce for Healthy Child Rearing," if the parents are absolutely positive that they can no longer live together. Better to surround the child with love, when the mother is with them and when the father is with them, than to stew the child in twenty years of icy disdain and contempt. Sure, in a perfect world two loving people with some very hands-on and nearby grandparents around is the preferred way to raise a child. Lacking that, a doubly dedicated single can do a damn fine job.
That said, holidays are hard.
I've been divorced going on six years now and I still have spent every Christmas day except one with my kids, their mom and her family. It's important to me, while my kids are still so young (nine and six), to preserve the magic of that day for them.
So this year, knowing that I will see them all in a month, I decided to stay in New York. This is only my second year as a single, single father and it is hard. Back when we were living in LA their mother lived around the corner from us and I had a live-in babysitter. Here in New York it's all Trey, all the time. Of course I love my kids to pieces. They are absolutely the centers of my universe, but I guess what I'm most thankful for until Sunday night is that I'm off the clock. I can stay out and sleep in. For four days I don't have to worry about them on the subway platform or crossing Broadway. For four days I am free and p.k. (pre-kids).
That way, when I pick them up at the gate at La Guardia Sunday afternoon I will not only be ready but I'll be eager to resume my roll as 24/7 daddy.