I’m still alive and other Thanksgiving miracles
You get to a certain age where you become thankful just for being alive and walking upright, for being more healthy and able than you perhaps deserve to be. Where you have conversations with friends who have put the same amount of years behind them and you each wonder, both flabbergasted and amazed, that you made it this far in life with only an acceptable and trivial number of problems that aren’t worth complaining about.
And maybe you’re grateful for whatever unwarranted blessings you have because it’s almost Thanksgiving Day, when you’re obligated to ruminate on those items in your win column — maybe your family and friends do that thing where you go around the table with each person proclaiming their gratitude for one thing or another.
Thanksgiving crowds have peaked and ebbed throughout my life. A few decades ago the dinner were sprawling affairs of dozens of far-flung relatives and friends who only got together for one day each year. Those celebrations were hosted by my grandparents in a rented hall at Leisure World in Laguna Hills.
A more compact affair that I remember fondly came in 1976, when all of my relatives traveled up to Fresno, leaving me alone, so my beloved grandmother cooked a complete Thanksgiving feast to enjoy with a handful of college friends and the woman who would become my wife a few years later. That one still breaks my heart to recall.
The nadir came a few years later when again the family affair took place elsewhere and my best friend and I thought it would be funny to have Thanksgiving dinner at Denny’s. It was not funny. I don’t know why we thought it would be.
The last several Thanksgivings were held at my mother-in-law’s house, first at Carroll Park in Bluff Heights and for the last few years in her home in Los Altos with most of my wife’s six siblings and their spouses and children.
But death hit the family hard this year, taking my mother-in-law and one of Jane’s brothers, so that location is off the table this year.
So, with our son Ray having to work on Thursday evening, we’re down to just Jane, Hannah and me and a pair of dogs for Thursday dinner, perhaps rain-checking Thanksgiving for a later date that can include Ray.
Even so, I’ll tally up, as the law demands, the things for which I’m grateful, both now and in the past, and they’re as plentiful as the stars, growing in number, as difficult as that is to imagine in these troubling and perilous times.
Why do bad things always happen to me?
My wife was sick with a terrible cold over the weekend, so guess who had to take care of everything — meals (DoorDash), groceries (Instacart), putting up the Christmas arches (paid a guy to do it). It’s a good thing my wife makes a nice salary; somebody’s gotta pay for this stuff.
And that’s not all for my action-packed week.
I was sitting in my chair on Saturday looking out the window at the guy putting up the arches — it looked pretty easy; I could probably do it myself but then what to do with all this money — when all of a sudden a finch flew into the house and in a panic kept hurling itself against the window and I, who generally also panics when faced with a madly fluttering bird when it’s indoors, jumped up to grab it before the dogs could get to it (happily, they were panicking too) and tossed it out the front door where, rather than following me for the rest of my life like you’ll see dozens of times in YouTube videos, it rocketed off to the west.
On Friday, I noticed a nail (a word that doesn’t do it justice; it looked like a Roman soldier’s spear) stabbed into the side of my car’s rear right tire. And, because I know a lot about cars, I figured I should maybe get that taken care of.
I took it to Allen Tire where I was told it would be a two-hour wait, so I went across the street to Heartwell Park as the sun began to set and enjoyed the quiet and read as the time flew by. I haven’t spent enough of my life at Heartwell (I’m a Whaley and El Dorado kid), and it’s a huge and beautiful place and an enjoyable park to pass the time if you’re, for instance, waiting for a tire to be repaired.
The best part was when I went to pay for the repair, I was told there was no charge.
Throw that on my list of things to be thankful for.