Thankful

Nov 28, 2024

Sometimes you just don’t see Thanksgiving coming.

My wife and I have birthdays a few weeks apart, so every year, for a little over a month, she’s a year older than I am. Every year I like to bring up in conversation thirty or forty times that I’ve married an older woman. I’m pretty sure she’s not tired of the joke.

Be that as it may, this year was one of those birthdays that end in zero, so our three children split the difference and planned a surprise birthday party for us, halfway between hers and mine.

It was quite a project. They wanted to invite people who were important to us, but it took some quiet digging to find out who those people are, and then they needed to figure out how to contact them. They missed a few, and in this day and age when nobody answers a phone call from a stranger, we now know there were people who were invited and never knew it.

It gets even more complicated. We live in what many people consider an isolated part of the state, but the tendrils of our lives reach out in every direction. It seemed like a lot to invite people to a party that would involve three or four hours of travel each direction, so our clever children reserved a room in an event center halfway between our house and the Twin Cities.

Then, of course, they had to get us there.

No problem. During the pandemic when we were all getting a little crazed from loneliness, someone came up with the idea of having a bakeoff. Everyone made a fancy dessert, and we met in a park to share. It was a great idea, but then the weather turned cold. We shivered through our eclairs, Napoleons, and blood orange cake around a picnic table in an abandoned state park, with the temperature around minus fifteen degrees.

Sneakily, our kids suggested another bakeoff, but this time chose an inside location, and we cluelessly agreed to show up. I'm sure there were hints and clues I missed, but I would be the world's worst spy, because when we opened the door and fifty or sixty people started singing “Happy Birthday Brent and Robin,” I was utterly surprised. Really. Several friends and family drive distinctive cars and they'd carefully parked them on the back side of the building. If I had seen them, I would have just thought, “Oh look, someone has a car just like Karen's.” A friend who hadn’t gotten the message that it was a surprise party was outside the door and said something like, “Is this where the Brent Olson Convention is?” That really should have been a clue, but I thought he was joking and was there for a family reunion of his own.

It was really something. I can forget what complicated and intertwined lives we lead. There were people I'd gone to high school with, relatives from both sides of the family, a table full of people hovering around the fifty-year mark who had been in our church youth group when they were teenagers and we weren't much older. There were people who know me only as a county commissioner and people who know me only as a writer, and friends and neighbors who know far too much about us in general. There was a friend who'd scraped me up off a gravel road after a motorcycle accident in 1971 and someone else who'd cheerfully lent us an almost endless amount of money when we visited him Hangzhou, China and found out our credit cards wouldn't work. The whole day was enormous fun, and one thing we both noticed was all these smart, interesting people who didn't know each other mingling and sharing stories.

So, profound thanks to our wily, clever children who pulled this off, and equal thanks to the people who went on the road on a winter's day in exchange for some key lime pie, a cup of coffee and some conversation. We’re touched beyond words of expression.

Thanksgiving comes every year. Some years I feel it more than others. This year, this week, I’m feeling it a lot.