I was reflecting today on the myriad of Thanksgiving Days I’d spent alone, and on some that I’d spent with special people in my life. One of the most memorable was twenty years ago today: Thanksgiving Day 1986…isn’t it amazing how time flies.[ohmygod: Ronald Reagan was president on that day!] It was surely an entirely different world for me then.

I was living in Corvallis at the time, as I had for the previous 16 years. I had moved there to go to grad school in chemistry at Oregon State University (OSU) during the summer of 1970, and continued to reside there after I finished up that advanced degree; it had become home more than anyplace ever had. Although I arrived in Corvallis as a college graduate, I actually did a whole lot of my “growing up” in that town during my 20s and 30s. I was divorced there in 1978. I started my own path of personal growth and development in a serious way there when I entered therapy with Linda Carroll in 1980. I began the OSU master’s degree program in counseling in 1982. I went through an alcohol diversion program there in 1983-84 as part of my DUII experience. And I met J there in 1985.

Linda and J are two of the (top three) people that have had the most influence on my life’s path. With J, it was in the form of a significant-other relationship that lasted a couple of years, encompassing that Thanksgiving Day twenty years ago.

J had just separated from her husband in late October that year, and ended up living in the same apartment complex as me. When she left her marriage the nature of our relationship dramatically changed, and we were in a very close and intense phase by Thanksgiving. As I recall, we rented about six or eight movies to watch that weekend; it was in the time before we even owned our own VCR, so, I remember, we rented the machine to play the movies as well. (Ah, the good old days!) I only remember one of the movies we watched that day, namely Sophie’s Choice. Very moving.

It was a gray and wet and cold weekend outside, but it was a close and intimate one in: characterized by a level of comfort and care and celebration that I have rarely found in my life, before or since.