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Friday Slide Show: An Old Thanksgiving
26 November 2021
Any Thanksgiving before the pandemic would qualify as an old one, we think. Everything was different then. You could gather. You could hug and kiss your loved ones. You could pass a plate or fill a glass with impunity.
Now the wiser among us are accustomed to being a bit more cautious. The risk simply isn't worth it.
It is true that this year, we are gathering (cautiously) again. And those of us smart enough to have been vaccinated are doing so with little real risk (although there's now a dangerous new South African variant).
It's almost the same. And yet it isn't. Not yet.
Photography's inescapable virtue of capturing a moment invites us, now and then, to also time travel. So we wound the clock back 10 years to 2011 to see how we celebrated that Thanksgiving.
One thing we did was take the Nikon 1 V1 with us to our friends' home. We had the 1 Nikkor VR 10-30mm zoom on it for these shots, which wide open still needed as much as ISO 3200 to get a good exposure.
Some things are the same, it was comforting to see.
The appetizers, the vegetables, the smiling chef, the mystery dish (was it scalloped potatoes, mac 'n cheese or broccoli in disguise?), the Millbrae gang video call with the Houston gang, the carving of the turkey, the bounty laid out on the dining room table.
We shot JPEGs with the V1 and they had their limitations. But they still serve to document the day. The good feeling. The bountiful feast.
And yet so much has changed.
What strikes us most these days is just that. What had changed. The more things change, so the saying goes, the more they are the same. As if we've seen it all before. But, no, with the pandemic the more things changed, the more was gone forever.
We didn't realize what we had until we lost it.
But now that we're regaining some of what we lost, we appreciate it all the more. And what we cannot have again -- the loved ones who perished -- we will not forget, grateful while they were here they knew they were loved.
