Thanksgiving Day

Posted on November 28, 2008

The streets were empty as were the sidewalks when we set out for a walk in the afternoon yesterday. The whole day had the dull appearance of a winter day, all color and life bleached out. We stepped out as the day brightened mildly, the weak afternoon sunlight filtering through the still gray-white clouds. One side of the sky was painted blue with just a speckling of white cloud tufts. The sidewalks were carpeted with multihued leaves. If we walked on a golden carpet of gingko biloba leaves on one street, we were squelching on reddish brown sycamore leaves, still wet from yesterday’s rains, on another street. A car stopped and disgorged a motley of ages, grandparents to little screaming toddlers as they headed into the house, for a family gathering of a traditional Thanksgiving dinner I suppose.

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday, devoid of religious and commercial overtones that characterize just about every other holiday that I know. It’s a day to be with family and friends, enjoy being the social animals that we are, and give thanks for what we have and what we are. For many years, we’d go to various friends’ houses for dinner. For the past couple of years however, we tend to be by ourselves. Shanthala was supposed to have been working but it got canceled in the end.

Walking on these empty streets, past houses that I imagined were filled with happy gatherings, accentuated the sense of social isolation that I’ve felt ever since Maya was born. Taking care of her is such a full time activity, I’m too tired to do much else. I’d rather be alone and enjoy a momentary lapse of chaos and eternal now, let my mind roam fields of imagination and unoccupied leisure. This is another thing about parenting in the west that I didn’t know about, a sense of isolation from everyone else. No wonder people join play groups and newborn mom groups and dads celebrate a night out together. Having Maya much later than all our friends makes us be almost alone as newborn parents. Also many friends have left the area, gone back to their home countries or other places. Even visiting someone who’s moved only as far as San Francisco seems like going to a whole other continent away. We hardly drive very far.

Things feel different now than before Maya. When we were by ourselves, lounging around in bed, reading or just slumming seemed plenty of socializing. Today, I feel the urge to go to a shopping mall. I’ve been to shopping malls probably a handful of times so far and most of those times were surgical operations, in and out very quickly. Shanthala and I both dislike the shopping mall. Yet, here I am, feeling the urge to be in one, among the milling throngs, feeling the pulse and throb of life. Is this why so many people spend time in the shopping malls ? It is so quiet on such winter days, it is easy to feel like one of the characters in those apocalyptic movies in which the world has been destroyed and there are only a handful of survivors. When Maya is asleep, the silence is broken only by the clickety-clack of the keyboard, the ticking of the clock and the occasional caw-caw of crows.

Yesterday evening, Shanthala and I read that all the infant formulas sold in the US have been found to contain traces of melamine, the chemical that was responsible for thousands of pet deaths last year and hospitalized about 15,000 children and killed two in China earlier this year. FDA and the industry reporters are saying that the amounts are extremely small, about 0.17-0.4 parts per million that it poses no threat to the infants. The doctors who’re more cognizant of the data say that while we know how much melamine definitely causes harm, we don’t know the effects of smaller traces, especially on infants. The reports say that this is not like the other cases of melamine, in which the food was deliberately laced with melamine to increase the protein content detected in tests, but this time it maybe the result of it being leached into the formula as a side effect of its presence in the manufacture of the containers carrying the formula. Coincidentally, Maya had started to refuse her formula milk a few days back, agreeing only to eating solids and drinking cow’s milk in the mornings. This story sealed the fate of the formula in our house. Luckily for us, Maya is at a stage where we can stop the formula without worrying about her nutrition.

Baby formula was invented by the man called as the “father of the fertilizer industry”, a German chemist named Justus von Liebig. He is credited with discovering nitrogen as an essential nutrient for plants and describing the effects of individual nutrients on plants. Starting with that unqualified flop of a baby formula when he formulated it in 1867, infant formula has grown to a multi-billion dollar industry today. The prominence of infant formula peaked in the west in the late 70s when an estimated 75% of the infants were fed with formula and breast milk was considered a poor, ancient and less salubrious to both the mother and the infant. Medical evidence since then has pushed breast milk back into prominence in the west only to have the industries target the developing world, where concern over safety and accuracy of advertisements is either not enforced or non-existent. But even here, when we left the hospital after Maya was born, we left with a carton or two of Nestle’s Good Start.

After our walk, I went for a run, the first in more than two weeks, pushing my jogging muscles into remembering their halcyon days. I finished a five mile run in a very decent 35 minutes, a seven-minute per mile pace, but I was a little bushed. The day ended as so many of these past nine months have, with Maya nestled in my arms, her arms tightly wrapped around my neck, her face peaceful.