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After a Thanksgiving Feast

After a Thanksgiving Feast

Last updated on: December 7, 2015 at 1:00 am by Richard Chess

After a Thanksgiving Feast 2015-12-06T17:29:20-07:00 Richard Chess

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I carry my failure with me. My embarrassment. My shame. It grows.

It sets me apart from men in my life, the hard man with the violin, the thin man with the flask. See them in the photo. They have enough, more than enough. If one day they leave a little, the next they put less on their plate.

My life? Apparently, the sustaining belief is this: never enough. Never enough sweetness. Never enough love. Never enough, so I surround myself with more. More than I’ll ever consume. Not enough hours in life to read as many pages as are packed onto floor-to-ceiling shelves. And if there were, what then?

I carry the day my birthfather drove away. I wasn’t more than eight-weeks-old. I haven’t stopped eating since then.

I forget: When did I finally understand that my art wasn’t art, not art enough to win recognition, awards? I must have eaten a fistful of pistachios that day. When did I discover what some in America knew from the day I was born: I am white? I think I ate cheese that night.

I am average. I am so average American male Jewish white. And at 62: overweight, not obese.

I bear what I can; I bear what I must.

The weight of fears I have been collecting as far back as memory goes.

The weight of spoon lifted from bowl to parted lips, and the weight of words withheld from those I’ve hated, those I’ve loved, and the weight of the reason I mostly withhold but sometimes blurt out. The weight of regret.

The weight of Jerusalem stone pissed on, kissed. The weight of palm frond fallen, Beverly Hills, and the weight of Philly pretzel mustard smeared on sleeve, and the weight of BA, MA, PhD, complete set of expensive degrees. Who is strong enough to keep the key to the universe?

The weight of palm on the crown of the head, the blessing, the ancient priestly blessing dropped onto the head of a son who indulges my belief and a daughter who honors it by challenging it.

I believe, but not exactly. Compared to the weight of those whose belief is the bone that broken mends, those who dutifully and daily proclaim belief in The Name, The Rock, the King, I am like a cocktail napkin that could be swept away in a summer breeze.

Then why this morning do I feel like I did last night, Thanksgiving, “the central ton of every place” (“The Heavy Bear That Goes with Me,” Delmore Schwartz)?

What do you see when you look at the family photo from my stepdaughter’s wedding?

I’m next to the last on the right. Suit jacket open, tie leaning slightly right. And what I know is there, what I carry with me everywhere, what bulges just above belt buckle, what is mostly hidden from view beneath the billowy shirt coming un-tucked at the waist.

When I lie down, when I rise up, when I sit (and loosen, loosen another notch the belt, and sometimes unbutton, sometimes unzip), and when I walk by the way: It’s there, the way they say my love of God should be there and God’s great love of me always is.

I carry the image with me: flat stomach.

I can see to the horizon but not, when standing, my feet.

I indulge myself but not, as in Donald Justice’s “The Thin Man,” “in rich refusals.”

Pecan, pumpkin: holy pies.

Because of my weight, my self-consciousness never sleeps. For this, at least, I’m thankful: I will never be alone.

And my generous wife: She loves me with her refusal to complain about what she sees when I take off my shirt, when the parade of me marches toward her in bed. For this, I’m thankful the most.

Richard Chess is the author of three books of poetry, Tekiah, Chair in the Desert, and Third Temple. Poems of his have appeared in Telling and Remembering: A Century of American Jewish Poetry, Bearing the Mystery: Twenty Years of IMAGE, and Best Spiritual Writing 2005. He is the Roy Carroll Professor of Honors Arts and Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Asheville. He is also the director of UNC Asheville’s Center for Jewish Studies.

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