WobblyReport

Turkey, Lions and grandmother are the three essential ingredients that make Thanksgiving Thanksgiving. This year’s Thanksgiving celebration is a relatively small gathering for us but all the essential ingredients are here. We’ve brought spring rolls and deviled eggs to this year’s feast. Other family members claimed dibs on all the principal, traditional foods. At least, we assumed so, from fragmented memories of fragmented plans from fragmented conversations. The drawing together of these fragments is what makes a particular Thanksgiving. This year, grandmother’s daughter is hosting. Sister is missing, being at her husband’s family’s Thanksgiving, a bit like when everyone realizes no one is bringing pumpkin pie. Awareness of the lack persists before, during and after the event, which becomes defined both by what is present and what is not. I’d been the first to pull this kind of disappearing act when living and working abroad during the mid aughts. After several years in a row,...

Riding a motorcycle in Northern Michigan during the month of November is neither for the ill-prepared nor the faint of heart. A body must be prepared both for an initial shock and, depending on circumstances, an endurance challenge. A blast of 60-mile-an-hour cold wind, its chilly tendrils reaching into any part of a rider’s outfit that isn’t airtight, testing the layers underneath, tends to cause one’s face, neck and shoulders to tense up. Full-face helmets are the best remedy but I haven’t yet replaced one I left in the Pacific Northwest in 2008. On a solo mission in early October this year, the cold crept up and took me by surprise. Attending a meeting in the southeast of our coverage area led to a return ride to home base after dark on one of the first nights the temperature sank below 50 degrees Fahrenheit (10 degrees Celsius). Consistent, unseasonably warm temperatures in the days and nights just prior had lulled me into overconfidence and I was without gloves. Between pockets...