Thanksgiving 1982

My memories of Thanksgiving from when I was a little girl are of me, my mom, my dad, a turkey, and Ocean Spray cranberry sauce in the can (which is, just so you're aware, superior to every other cranberry sauce on the face of this planet). Sometimes we combined our celebration with family friends (above; and lol at my grumpy face), and sometimes my grandparents on my dad's side came to visit from LA or a relative on my mom's side came to visit from Canada, but we didn't have any family who lived close to us, so more often than not it was just us hanging out in New York City and eating too many sweet potatoes.

Except, as it turned out, there were more of us than we'd realized.

Me and my milk and my emails, 7AM

With two kids in the house, there is a lot of milk that gets consumed on a daily basis. And in our house, it’s even more than you’d expect, because my five-year-old and my two-year-old aren’t the only ones interested in the stuff. (Just to be clear, they're primarily interested when it's located next to cookies or on top of fluorescent cereal puffs, in case you were under the impression that I was raising Health Angels. I'm not.)

Not infrequently, I’ve had a houseguest comment on my habit of waking up, walking directly to the refrigerator, and pouring a massive glass of (super-cold) milk. “Jordan?” they ask. “Are you...what are you doing?”

Here we are again. So let's do this, again. 

OK, never mind. I said I was going to return to the regular RG programming, but I can't. Not yet. There's too much panic and fear and sadness out there; too many people who feel helpless, like the world is crumbling beneath them. A few minutes ago, I left a meeting with my local school district that I'd requested to discuss what exactly is going on with the crippling under-funding and what the community can do to help, and left feeling despondent about the state of education in America, and how much worse it's going to get as the economy plummets. I sat down on a wall to wait for my ride home, and clicked over to Facebook only to find a post titled "Farewell America." I read it with tears pouring down my face.

Because what that post said was that we have reached the end of the American experiment. That America as we have known it is gone, and that nothing will ever be the same.