Thanksgiving’s passed by way of Thanksgivings past

Like probably everyone else, I would love another five days “off.” With

• an exam to write,
• a dissertation proposal to comment on for the umpteenth time (at this point, I wonder if I shouldn’t just write the thing myself—and no, I don’t think it could be any picnic to be my advisee),
• a recommendation letter to revise to the level of puffery befitting the genre,
• a conference panel to propose,
• an invited essay to revise, and
• yet another heap of grading (by the way, why the fuck did I assign drafts due the class before Thanksgiving, when they’ll perhaps understandably do a shoddy job, and I’ll have to provide useful feedback for revisions?)

in the next two weeks, well, I’m pretty overwhelmed. Still, I’m grateful this Thanksgiving hasn’t been like some past Thanksgivings. I wound up spending the holiday in town—first on the phone and then at a celebration hosted by a couple of groovy vegan hippies. I brought “stuffing bread,” which is just my standard bread recipe with onions, celery, carrots, mushrooms, and herbs mixed into the dough, inspired by my childhood love of stuffing sandwiches. This year, I tried Tofurky, which isn’t bad, though I do wonder at vegetables shaped like meat. At the height of the Atkins fad, I had considered marketing meat carved up and dyed to look like vegetables, but, typifying someone who would study the humanities, I never got around to implementing my entrepreneurial genius. Alas.

Seriously, I always get anxious at this time of year, because Thanksgiving marks the beginning of December, which in my experience really is the cruelest month. Thanksgiving transforms December into an extended-play dance remix of seasonal depression, with an infectious beat of stress. Nts nts nts nts nts nts. . . Can you hear it? Can you feel it?

Yeah, I’ve never handled this time of year well. But I’m glad it’s going better so far than two of my most memorable Thanksgivings, which, curiously enough, demarcate my grad school years.

* * *

I avoid malls at this time of year, partly because they’re inevitably fusterclucks, but mostly because I’m a little afraid of department-store Santas. No, I’ve never been touched by one or felt so dirty afterwards, though the sight of them does make me feel faintly guilty and embarrassed.

My last year in grad school, I had scheduled my dissertation defense just before Thanksgiving, which came and went without any invitations for MLA interviews. Though the previous year I had applied for a handful of dream jobs and gotten interviews, despite having no firm defense date, my last year of grad school would pass with no interviews.

That weekend, I of course had no idea of this outcome, and as I passed by a Ben Franklin store in a strip mall, I felt sorry for its Santa, all cordoned off and alone, hohoho-ing his kringly heart out at a crappy-crafts store rather than, say, a place where you’d actually find kids and the wallets of their doting parents. I didn’t get close enough to know for sure, but I hoped he was at least gin-sodden, to take the edge off of what must have been debilitating disappointment. As sorry as I felt for the Ben Franklin Santa (who didn’t, by the way, resemble Ben Franklin), though, I felt sorrier for myself. For a moment, I thought of asking him for an MLA interview. You know: climbing onto his lap, asking for my dearest wish after assuring him I had been a very good girl, and having a picture taken for whatever fee they charged. Would the interview requests have flooded in if I had? Would my career have taken a different course?

I didn’t contemplate the possibility for long, because that evening, my dad was hospitalized for a bizarre condition caused by a congenital defect that made him spontaneously septic. I rushed to my parents’ house as soon as I had submitted my grades. After surgery, my dad came home, only to return to the hospital after a week. On Christmas day, he had a second surgery. My mom and I went to the hospital to exchange gifts, headed to a Chinese restaurant for Christmas dinner, and tacitly prepared for the worst. I had forgotten about MLA, which was just as well.

* * *

The events of that December made a routinely rough time even rougher. Years earlier—my first semester in grad school, in fact—I had discovered my problem adjusting to dark winters. Right after we fell back to Standard Daylight Time that year, I began to dread nightfall so much that I found myself cursing Benjamin Franklin (lo, there he is again!), with his cheap-ass innovation for saving candles by getting up earlier in the summer and turning the clock ahead.

As I said, it was my first semester in grad school. I was in a new town far enough from home to make the trip too much of a bother. I was also much less decrepit than I am now, as well as a little more enterprising from having worked for The Man for a few years, so I invited over a bunch of fellow grad students who didn’t have anywhere else to go, and, Babette-like, cooked a magnificent dinner. They brought dessert, wine, and sparkling conversation. Thanksgiving dinner continued till dawn.

A scant few hours later, I decided to drag myself to the library and work on the three term papers, in various stages of completion, that were due imminently. The library was deserted. I felt virtuous. Then I settled into my carrel for nine hours with my papers, shelves of books and journals, and an enormous thermos of coffee. I attempted to work, watching helplessly as the words slid all over their pages and made no sense. It was dark outside when I dragged myself back home. Discouraging as this experience was, I repeated it the next two days, feeling progressively more helpless and useless.

The following Monday morning I walked into an oncoming bus and received minor injuries. Confronted by the psychiatrist at the emergency room, I babbled and cried. Though I swore my accident had occurred because I was tired and distracted, and that it was indeed an accident—I didn’t do it on purpose—she sent me to a psychiatric facility, where I remained for three days and could not talk my way out. Those days put a lot of things in perspective. Besides learning that I had a stunning serotonin deficit tied to the seasons, I was surrounded by people with real problems. Many of them were homeless and needing medication. My roommate was a young mother who had hanged herself. I spent much of my time there just listening. After all, I was still unable to concentrate sufficiently to read or write, which was just as well, since I wasn’t allowed sharp implements like pencils or pens. After three days of group counseling that involved dolphin sounds and crayons, the psychiatrist sprang me. I finished the semester with none of my professors being the wiser.

* * *

In fact, I eventually published one of those papers I couldn’t read. Though that article embarrasses me, and to my knowledge no one has cited it, an eminent scholar assigns it to her grad students, as I discovered when one of them contacted me about it.

And so there is a happy ending. Actually, there have been multiple happy endings that really aren’t endings. My dad just returned from mountain-climbing. Every chance he gets he hectors me about finding a nice boy to marry. To be honest, I find this more annoying than my seasonal problem, which too has become just another routine thing to manage. When I can’t concentrate on my students’ papers, the reason is boredom, not a serotonin deficit. And while I’m not always happy about grading, I enjoy my students, an imaginative, energetic bunch. This morning I’m marking their truly horrific drafts (and procrastinating from doing so by writing this post) in my brilliantly sun-flooded living room. A fire crackles in the fireplace. A batch of stuffing bread is rising on the stove, next to hot spiced tea in a pot sent to me out of the blue last month by a guest at my first Thanksgiving in grad school. A dozen gigantic pumpkin muffins are baking in the oven. The place smells heavenly. For a moment, I could be convinced that it really is the most wonderful time of the year.