A Thanksgiving note from Tobias Wolff

We published this brief and beautiful vignette by the great Tobias Wolff in the inaugural issue of my old magazine, Radio Silence. At the time, we also screen-printed a limited run of 100 large-format rock posters with Toby’s words and the design below by Brandon Herring. One of them hangs in the hallway of my house, just outside my office, so I see it every day and have paused to read it hundreds of times over the years, and always on Thanksgiving.

I find in this piece a deep hope many parents share—that our children will be curious and open and bright enough to recognize great art when they encounter it, to connect with and appreciate those timeless works of genius that bind us through the generations.

-DS

---

---

poster art by Brandon Herring

Thanksgiving, 1990. I was driving my family from upstate New York to my brother’s place in Rhode Island. We had done this many times before, and of all occasions of the year it was the one I looked forward to most, but I was brooding over some professional difficulty. To distract myself I rummaged in the tape box and came up with Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. It’d been knocking around in there for months, but playing it always seemed more of a project than I was ready for. And even now there was something perverse in my choice. I expected my boys, ten and eleven, to complain in favor of something hipper or at least shorter, and I was resolved to make them listen anyway for their own damned good.

No one said anything for a while. We were driving along the Mohawk River. The day was cold and clear. The light glittered on the water, in the windows of the old brick factories in the towns we passed. The baby slept in the back, my wife dozing between her and my son Michael. My youngest boy, Patrick, was up front with me. He had strong opinions; he would be the first to object. I was ready for him.

We’d gotten through the first movement and were well into the second when he finally turned and said, “What is this? This is really great.”

And Michael said, “Yeah, this is great,” and leaned forward over his brother’s shoulder and hung there, listening.

Now this was pleasure, to watch their pleasure, so true and uncomplicated. Some twenty years earlier a clever girl had needled me about my taste for Beethoven. “He’s so bombastic,” she said. “So grandiose. Do you really like that stuff?”

I did, but she made me wonder why — because it was Beethoven, and I was a hick? I went on listening to Beethoven, but at certain moments some small doubt soured my ears.

But these boys of mine were listening without prejudice or reverence, and the purity of their attention somehow refreshed my own, so that I was hearing the music as it deserved, without that whisper from the corner.

To describe Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is to doom yourself to fatuity. Beauty, great-heartedness, endless surprise — these words don’t get you there. The hardest things to explain are those that move us to praise. There will be trouble, there will be pain, the music knows all this, but knows too that sometimes it is insanity not to sing to the heavens with thanks for friendship and brotherhood and the love of husband and wife; insanity not to be mindful of these things and grateful, as a man surrounded by his family is already grateful, on a cold sunny day, for good food waiting at the end of the road, in his brother’s house.