I’ve been in a bad mood for days and days and days (with intermittent cheeriness when not required to think) for reasons that are simultaneously very solid and deeply boring. So. Not going to get into that.
BUT: I haven’t been required to think much today, as I have pottered about my Thanksgiving preparations, and even as I type I can hear my children and husband having a blast while they pick up the basement (having fun as they pick up — all in all, it’s not a bad life), and I’m really, really trying to come up with a post. Yet, as they say in… in… Yiddish, maybe?… “yok.” A big fat nothing. (Might be Turkish. I’m really not clear on this).
BUT THE SECOND: I just saw someone on Twitter saying they’re grateful this Thanksgiving that it’s President Obama and Vice-President Biden, rather than President McCain and Vice-President Palin, and as a shudder went down my spine, I thought: “Oooh, yes. I am very grateful for that, indeed!”
So. A random list of things that bear being grateful for, even if they might not be the first thing to come to mind:
- The fact that it’s President Obama and Vice-President Biden, not President McCain and Vice-President Palin. Pause to let that sink in for a bit.
- Firefly. Obvs. (For reference, click here, and also here).
- Nathon Fillion, Alan Tudyk, Gina Torres, Jewel Staite, Sean Maher, Morena Baccarin, Summer Glau, Ron Glass, and Adam Baldwin (the cast of Firefly). And mostly Joss Whedon (creator, producer, often writer and director of Firefly. Not to mention composer of the very, very shiny theme song to Firefly). And the fine people at the Horde who hounded me into watching Firefly.
- Indeed, the Horde itself. It is a rare and delightful thing to find and help form a genuine community of caring, crazy-smart, and ding-dang funny people on the internet, yet there it is. Even though I’ve been in too bad a mood to hang out much the past few days, I’m very glad to know they’re out there in the tubes.
- Which I suppose means I’m also grateful for the person of, not just the writing of, Ta-Nehisi Coates, at whose blog the Horde gathers, but that sounds a little weird, so we’ll just leave that as subtext. Though I’m happy to be openly grateful for his writing.
- My couch. (You don’t know this [well, most of you don't] but my couch is the best couch in the universe, and the husband and I often comment — as the four of us sprawl across its sectional awesomeness — that it’s the best decision we ever made. Short of, you know, each other).
- The Black Keys - a most rocking twosome that I discovered this year and really, really love.
- These two straight guys kissing to protest the threat posed to Spain’s marriage equality law.
- The fact that Whole Foods got in a new shipment of that corn bread mix that my kids love.
- Oatmeal. With raisins and brown sugar.
I am, of course, very grateful also for the more obvious things (the kids and husband themselves, for instance, and friends and a beautiful home and my health and so on), but then, you already knew that, didn’t you? I’ll bet the couch thing hadn’t even crossed your mind!
If you’d like to leave your own utterly random list in comments, please do! And, while I’m at it – #11: My readers and commenters. Thanks so much for coming by, you guys. It means more than I think I can rightly say, but I take it as a real kindness. Thank you.
Happy Thanksgiving to one and all!
Eva Holland
/ November 23, 2011I’m grateful for the Horde, too. And for great friends IRL. And, tonight, for sambal oelek chili sauce. Also for The Vampire Diaries (although I’m sad that it’s off the air until January). And, as the cold dark depths of the Yukon winter close in on me, I remind myself daily to be grateful for how f*cking beautiful it is here at this time of year.
emilylhauser
/ November 23, 2011: )
Another thing to be grateful for: You can curse on WordPress all you want. You fucking heard me, god damn it!
helensprogeny
/ November 25, 2011A-fucking-men! And also, (just because I can): a big “fuck you” to Disqus. Which I mean in the friendliest possible way.
caoil
/ November 23, 2011Of course you know we’re thankful for you, right?
emilylhauser
/ November 23, 2011Aw. And here it’s not even your Thanksgiving! Thank you right back.
caoil
/ November 25, 2011I don’t think I can confine my thankfulness for certain things to just one day a year!
stephen matlock
/ November 23, 2011I’m grateful for the many second chances life offers. I have been lucky and blessed to have them.
emilylhauser
/ November 23, 2011You’re going to have to write a book about all those changes, you know.
stephen matlock
/ November 24, 2011Heh.
And who would read it?
Maybe I’ll just get real creative with a bumper sticker.
Lise
/ November 23, 2011Your sister.
emilylhauser
/ November 23, 2011That was under the headline of obvious!
My sister.
wearyvoter
/ November 24, 2011I am grateful for the Horde. I am also grateful for a husband who likes to cook, and will have time to do so tomorrow. (I will be following behind him on “clean as you go” and to hunt things out of obscure corners of the fridge and cupboard and bucket brigade them to the prep area.)
wearyvoter
/ November 24, 2011Also, too, I am grateful that you run an open thread here when TNC needs to be elsewhere.
dmf
/ November 24, 2011Abundance
By John Ciardi
I
Once I had 1000 roses.
Literally 1000 roses.
I was working for a florist
back in the shambling ‘Thirties
when iced skids of 250 roses
sold for $2 at Faneuil Hall.
So for $8 I bought
1000 roses, 500
white and 500 red,
for Connie’s wedding to steadiness.
I strewed the church aisle whole
and the bride came walking
on roses, roses all the way:
The white roses and the red roses.
White for the bed we had shared.
Red for the bed she went to
from the abundance in her
to the fear in what she wanted.
The gift was not in the roses
but in the abundance of the roses.
To her
whose abundance had never wholly
been mine, and could never be his.
He had no gift of abundance in him
but only the penuries of sobriety.
A good steady clerk, most mortgageable,
returning in creaking shoes over
the white and the red roses. Returning
over the most flowering he would ever
touch, with the most flowering I
had ever touched. A feast of endings.
II
This morning I passed a pushcart
heaped with white carnations
as high as if there had fallen all night
one of those thick-flaked, slow, windless,
wondering snows that leave
shakos on fence posts, polar bears
in the hedges, caves in the light,
and a childhood on every sill.
Once, twice a year, partially,
and once, twice a lifetime, perfectly,
that snow falls. In which I ran
like a young wolf in its blood
leaping to snap the flower-flakes
clean from the air; their instant on the tongue
flat and almost dusty and not enough
to be cold. But as I ran, face-up,
mouth open, my cheeks burned
with tears and flower-melt,
and my lashes were fringed with gauze,
and my ears wore white piping.
There is no feast but energy. All men
know—have known and will remember
again and again—what food that is
for the running young wolf of the rare days
when shapes fall from the air
and may be had for the leaping.
Clean in the mouth of joy. Flat and dusty.
And how they are instantly nothing—
a commotion in the air and in the blood.
—And how they are endlessly all.
III
My father’s grave, the deepest cave I know,
was banked with snow and lilies. We stuck the dead flowers
into the snow banks dirty with sand
and trampled by digger’s boots.
The flowers, stiff and unbeckoning,
ripped from their wires in the wind
and blew their seasons out as snow
Purer than the snow itself. A last
abundance correcting our poverties.
I remember the feasts of my life,
their every flowing. I remember
the wolf all men remember in his blood.
I remember the air become
a feast of flowers. And remember
his last flowers whitening winter
in an imitation of possibility,
while we hunched black
in the dirtied place inside possibility
where the prayers soiled him.
If ever there was a man of abundances
he lies there flowerless
at that dirty center
whose wired flowers try and try
to make the winter clean again in air.
And fail. And leave me raging
as the young wolf grown
from his day’s play in abundance
to the ravening of recollection.
Creaking to penury over the flower-strew.
IV
This morning I passed a pushcart
heaped beyond possibility,
as when the sun begins again
after that long snow and the earth
is moonscaped and wonderlanded
and humped and haloed in the
light it makes: an angel
on every garbage can, a god
in every tree, that childhood
on every sill.—At a corner of the ordinary.
Where is she now? Instantly nothing.
A penury after flower-strew. Nothing.
A feast of glimpses. Not fact itself,
but an idea of the possible in the fact.
—And so the rare day comes: I was again
the young wolf trembling in his blood
at the profusions heaped and haloed
in their instant next to the ordinary.
And did not know myself what feast I kept
—till I said your name. At once all plenty was.
It is the words starve us, the act that feeds.
The air trembling with the white wicks
of its falling encloses us. To be
perfect, I suppose, we must be brief.
The long thing is to remember
imperfectly, dirtying with gratitude
the grave of abundance. O flower-banked,
air-dazzling, and abundant woman,
though the young wolf is dead, all men
know—have known and must remember—
You.
Darth Thulhu
/ November 25, 2011Thankful for your warmth and decency. Happy Turkey Weekend!