Thanksgiving 2077: A Short Story
Terry Bisson
I was first, as the eldest and the closest, in a way. I had lived with Grandpa and “Uncle” Johnny through my teens after both my parents were killed in the fighting in Philly. My cousins hadn’t enjoyed that distinction.
The old house looked run down, but hey, so did Grandpa. He was sitting on the porch, rolling a cigarette, and I noticed that his hands were a little shaky.
“You’re smoking?” I didn’t even try not to sound disapproving.
“Only temporarily, Emma,” he said. “Meanwhile, give me a hug.”
That wasn’t hard. He was skinny as a rail and his cigarette smelled a little funny. I suspected he had called us together for more than one reason and, alas, as it turned out, I was right.
He even let me help with the cooking. All that morning I was in and out of the kitchen as my cousins arrived. By 11:55 Grandpa had us all around the big oak table.
“The turkey is almost done,” he said. He insisted that we put aside our phones and pads to catch the official ceremonies on TV. An old union man (IWW 2.0), Grandpa was nothing if not patriotic.
Somebody-or-other Rodriguez, the Congress rep from Mississippi (the watershed, not the state) was giving thanks for the progress in wetland restoration, income adjustment, voter communication, littoral evacuation . . .
“Progress in means problems with,” grumbled Les, our litigator. “Sometimes I think that all socialism changes is the words.”
Grandpa laughed. “That’s something to be thankful for,” he said. “I can remember when income adjustment wasn’t even in the country’s vocabulary.”
“Neither was littoral evacuation,” complained Jesse, our youngest.
We all joined hands around the table for the national anthem, “This Land is Your Land.” Even Howard, our tuneless scholar, sang, but only after observing that he’d like it better if an Indian had written it instead of a settler.
The prayer, at least, was short and sweet. “So ecumenical it’s almost free-range,” quipped Wendell, our agricultural atheist. Then Grandpa turned off the TV and disappeared into the kitchen. He returned with the turkey. “Free-range too, of course!”
“Of course,” muttered Les. “How else can you keep them so skinny?”
“No complaints, please!” said Grandpa, beginning to carve. “This is Thanksgiving, and at least everybody gets one these days.”
“Without standing in line at a soup kitchen,” I added. Then I brought in the biscuits. That got a few cheers.
We all chowed down. Grandpa opened the wine, which thankfully was a nice California red. In DC all we get these days is Virginia, thanks to all the overzealous local locavores.
“I’ll go first,” said Grandpa, raising his glass. “By giving thanks for all my lovely contentious grandchildren who have graciously interrupted their lives to join me here today. Who’s next?”
“I’m thankful that I got here at all,” groaned Lydia, our linguist, who can groan in six languages. “I’m working as a translator at Immigration Pediatrics in Atlanta, enrolling refugees, and I had to explain to two separate committees why I needed three days to attend a two-hour dinner, and then it was an all-nighter on a slow bus detouring around the smoke plume from the Colorado wildfires.”
“No complaints, please. We’re all thankful that you made it as well,” said Grandpa. “Next?”
“I’m sixty percent thankful that the fires are sixty percent under control at last,” said Mark, our brigadier, who was working off his student debt in a fire crew. “I was out there trenching and hauling water until just last week. Luckily, I had a furlough coming, and Annie gave me a ride.”
“You have a car?!” We all stared at Annie, not so much jealous as amazed.
“Of course not,” Annie said, our do-gooder. “But our senior-care collective does. We need it for the home visits. I told a white lie and got it for the weekend, but I have to be back early Monday.”
“What’s a white lie?” asked Jesse.
“A harmless lie,” said Grandpa. “And I’m sure Annie’s thankful that the homeless all have homes. Who’s next?”
“I’m thankful that the drought is easing,” said Wendell, our country cousin. “The North Prairie corn crop looks good, and I’m thankful that we saved enough heritage seed to get us through. And I’m hopeful for the future. Our GMO teams are developing corn that grows on vines! No more ripping the topsoil every year. Though I’m going to miss the old John Deere.”
“Now that you’re done plowing under the family farm,” grumbled Les. “Willie Nelson must be rolling over in his grave.”
“Willie should roll less and read more history,” said Howard. “The family farm was just a mechanism for child labor. They needed the nine-month school year so the kids could be put in harness. Plus the big cooperative farms are the best way to avoid chemicals and grow organics. How you going to feed the world otherwise?”
“If co-op farms are so good, how come we only eat meat twice a week?” grumbled Les.
“So others around the world can eat it once a week,” said Grandpa. “What kind of world would it be if half the people were skinny so the other half could get fat?”
“Plus, raising meat is wasteful,” said Wendell. “Think of a pig as a calorie sink.”
“Yesterday’s waste is today’s wealth,” said Katie, our optimist, who operated a backhoe for Resource Management. “Landfill mining can be tedious, but I’m thankful that we have all this plastic to reprocess now that petroleum is under UN interdiction.”
“Thank you for that thanks,” said Grandpa. “How about you, Rebecca? What are you giving thanks for today?”
“Family,” she said, our housewife. “I love you all, but Frank should be here too. He’s been up in Alaska since June with the UN team tearing out those stupid pipelines. They were supposed to be done last month.”
“The wildlife protocols at work!” said Grandpa. “You should be proud.”
“I guess I am,” she said. “And with three kids, I’m getting paid for childcare, so that helps. Though sometimes I wonder, who cares about a bunch of stupid caribou anyway?”
“The other caribou?” offered Grandpa. “Your turn, Jane. Any visits from the muse?”
“She wouldn’t know where to find me. I’m with a Commons Restoration team, painting bridges and taking out fences, which means a lot of travel. The good news is, I finally got that novel-writing grant I applied for two years ago, so I get one week off a month next year.”
“We should all give thanks for that,” said Grandpa. “Socialism needs great literature!”
“Actually, it’s science fiction, not literature,” said Jane.
“Even more essential,” said Grandpa. “How about you, Nathaniel? What are you thankful for this Thanksgiving?”
“The Grim Reaper,” said Nathaniel, our computer nerd. “Don’t look at me like that, I’m serious. I’m thankful that the pre-Rev dinosaurs are dying off, mostly of old age, even though scheduling their rants on People’s Access still takes up half my workweek. Ten to twelve hours a week at least.”
“Even dinos have a right to be heard,” said Grandpa, who was proud to be a liberal, especially now that it was a bad word again.
“Not only a right but a responsibility,” said Nathaniel. “When this new electoral protocol is approved, everyone will be required to log in and vote at least once a week, not only locally but nationally.”
“In the old days,” said Howard, “most folks didn’t even bother voting. The candidates were chosen for them by advertising.”
“What’s advertising?” asked Jesse.
“Harmful lies,” said Grandpa. “What about you, Cecelia? Have you finished your Brigade service?”
“Last August,” said Cecelia, who had been working off a degree in environmental architecture from Stanford@Tulsa. “But now I’m thinking of going back to college.”
“Anything beats working, I guess,” mumbled Les.
“Study is work,” snapped Cecelia. “I’m going back because I got inspired by my Brigade work in day care. I thought it would just be tying shoes for toddlers. But the architecture of human intelligence is fascinating. If I get accepted, I’ll be working with the top minds, the best scientists in the country.”
“Not to mention the best bucks,” grumbled Les.
Cecelia smiled and shrugged. Child development is in the highest quadrant of the USSA’s four pay grades.
“Wish I was in some kind of development,” said Jesse. He had always wanted to be a cop or a lawyer, but since there was little call for either these days, he had joined the Brigade right after high school. “I thought infrastructure would be building stuff,” he said. “Not just tearing down prisons and dams. And now I’m stuck in Florida. The evacuation and resettlement is almost done, but we still have to haul off all their crap before it washes away and pollutes the fisheries.”
“Can’t blame the rising seas on socialism,” said Grandpa. “If we’d dismantled capitalism earlier, we could have stopped global warming. Or at least slowed it. Now half your work is damage control.”
“There is a good side even to that,” said Howard, currently a Zinn scholar with Harvard@Nashville. “I’m writing a paper arguing that the transition to socialism was easier since the government was more involved with disaster relief than war. More peaceful, for sure.”
“Somewhat,” grumbled Les, who had lost an eye in the Baltimore Courtroom Assault. “But I doubt many folks would have gone for socialism if they had known it meant downsizing.”
“How many would have gone for capitalism,” said Grandpa, “if they had known that it required continual mindless expansion?”
“Billions,” mumbled Les. “People are stupid and greedy.”
“Capitalism might have worked,” said Alita, our starstruck dreamer, “if only the planet had gotten bigger every year.”
“It seemed, for a few centuries at least, that it did,” said Howard. “The discovery of the “new world” meant that Europeans could . . .”
“Zzzz,” said Jesse, dramatically slumping his head onto the table, next to the gravy bowl.
“All right, no more history lessons,” said Grandpa. “Your turn, Alita. That sweet smile tells me you have something to be thankful for.”
“I do,” said Alita, who was just finishing her doctorate in astronomy from Columbia@Tucson. “I got my Brigade assignment last week, and it runs concurrent with my post-doc.”
“Which means?” we all asked.
“Two years as a lunatic.”
“Gingrich?” Grandpa sounded more jealous than amazed. He was always a science-fiction fan.
“Bingo! Next month I leave from Baikonur Equatorial for the dark side of the moon. I’ll be on the rocky worlds team. Interning at first, then who knows?”
“Congratulations,” said Howard. “Though I still can’t believe the UN’s moon base was named for that nutty old reactionary.”
“Even a stopped watch is right once a day,” mumbled Les.
“Twice,” said Alita.
“Let’s not argue, children. Now let’s hear from Emma, who made this delicious apple pie.”
“Apple-rhubarb,” I said. “I’m thankful that Marge and I finally got the go-ahead from Local Peripherals to open our restaurant. Now I can use the cooking skills you and Johnny taught me on something more interesting than stew for restoration teams.”
“Meatless mulligan,” mumbled Les.
“I hear it wasn’t so bad,” said Grandpa, opening the last bottle of wine. “And now it’s my turn.”
“No complaints!” we all chimed in.
“I’m thankful that screw-tops have finally replaced corks. And that community control has finally replaced private ownership. That decisions are being made by people instead of by capital. That we have an economy based on sustainability instead of growth. That nobody can cut an ancient tree or foul an aquifer just to make a buck.”
“So you’re actually a conservative!” teased Howard.
“Always was,” said Grandpa. As if to prove it, he began rolling a cigarette. “Socialism is about conserving the planet for future generations.”
“You’re smoking?!” We all complained in one voice. All but me. I’m slow but I was catching on, neither amazed nor surprised. Just dismayed.
“Allow an old man his vices. I will only be indulging them for a few more months. I won’t be around for next Thanksgiving, which is why I brought you all together. A bit of a farewell.”
There was a long silence. Which I broke.
“So it’s back,” I said.
“Cancer is like capitalism, Emma. All it knows how to do is grow. You can only live with it so long.”
“What about the canadas?” Annie protested. That’s what we call the neighborhood clinics. “Can’t they send you up to Oncology?”
Grandpa shook his head, more than a little sadly. “To Hospice. I’m an old man, kids. Medical resources are limited like everything else, and the world is filled with young folks who need it more than a geezer who’s almost eighty. It’s only fair that I move aside. Pass on, as they used to say.”
It was Lydia who burst into tears. “That was my white lie! I said I was going to my grandfather’s funeral.”
“Now you’re an honest woman again,” said Grandpa. “I’m thankful for that. And for the good years with Johnny. And especially for the privilege of growing old, for living long enough to see the beginnings of a new age, not just here but in the world. So no complaints, please.”
“Goddamn it,” said Jesse. “Some Thanksgiving.”
“I’ll take that complaint as a compliment. Now since I can’t smoke in the house, out of respect for Johnny’s rules as well as common law, perhaps some of you will join me on the porch.”
We all did. I brought out coffee. Fair-trade, of course. Grandpa’s funny-smelling cigarette was only half tobacco, so he passed it around. Then he passed out fidels, which we were told we could keep in his memory, or smoke if we wished.
I have plenty of memories, more than a girl deserves, so I dried my eyes on my apron and lit mine.
So did Les.
“Cuban,” he remarked. “And every bit as good as ever.”
Both amazed and surprised, I sat down beside him and rapped him on the head. It was so hard it hurt my knuckles. “So what do you say?”
“Thanks.”