Margaret Renkl: All the empty seats at the Thanksgiving table

Nashville — In the box of old photos I found after my mother’s death, there’s a picture of me taken on Thanksgiving Day 1983, in the fall of my senior year of college. I’m lying on the sofa reading James Agee’s letters to Father Flye.
(Courtesy Margaret Renkl via The New York Times)
The author at home in 1983. (Courtesy Margaret Renkl/)I don’t know why the photo exists — we were not a family who documented ordinary moments. Our pictures centered on peopl