Can you get anything you want on Thanksgiving?

Kol Nidre. Recitation of the Haggadah. Shaking out hopes, harvest, and the lingering reflections of repentance with the lulav and etrog. There are certain moments in the year in which we embody a wish or tradition that holds time itself together. Year to year, like the thick black wires draped between tall wooden poles carrying the electricity that powers the light and communications and cooking and heat of our homes, rituals are the pegs, the poles, the immovable weight that ground the energy we need to make life meaningful.

And so enters Alice. And her restaurant. To be more precise, so enters “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree.” Give it a spin as you read these words perhaps? Arlo Guthrie’s 18-minute epic of food and friends, bureaucracy and war, cops and clowns has marked every Thanksgiving I’ve known for 56 years. I know it’s a Boomer song and carries words and phrases that Arlo would never use today, but I will have listened to it four or five times by the time you have finished this sentence. It’s a song, a goofball prayer, simple strings, and a reedy-thin voice above a wishing well that has its place in the electrifying ritual Hall of Fame.

“You can get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant,” Arlo sings, and we know that this is surely not true. We have lost so much these past two years: lives, innocence, time, peace of mind, security, money, stability, and even dreams. Can you find any of these things in her restaurant, even if Alice is a saint? Some yes, some no. But even in a tall tale like Arlo’s, there’s always a kernel of truth.

The list of problems from which Thanksgiving emanates is as long and familiar as the shopping list I save from year to year as I prepare for the meal I make. The clash between ambitious founders and a native culture, these poor industrially sacrificed turkeys, toasting victory at a time of decimation of the other side — it all reminds us that life is fragile and unforgiving. It can be brutal and extreme. There are severe prices to be paid. And so too, life is for laughter with family and friends, food prepared with love, telling familiar stories and stupid jokes, singing along with the weirdo song you first heard with your mom and dad when you were a kid. Life is memories. Life is with people.

Thanksgiving is here again. The wheel of another year has turned. It’s been and will continue to be an age of hard choices and confusion, but it’s also — as every age and every day must be — a time of gratitude, connection, and love. May your heart be as full as your table, may you remember those who suffer as you say thank you for your bounty. And if for a moment on Thanksgiving you get everything you want, be sure to ask the stranger, even the enemy, and also the turkey if you can bear it, what he, she, or they want too so that we are all a little smarter, a little more whole, a little closer to better days when we meet up with Arlo and Alice next year.