Please and Thank You

This is the time when fields of pumpkins and zucchini stretch for miles and the sky holds impossible moons: Thanksgiving is weather for sweaters and for a sense of amazement for this beautiful, wretched earth.

I am thankful to be a part of its stories. I am terrified of floods and lava and Homer napping through the button: sometimes I’m petrified of meteors and wild waves and the impersonal nurture of nature that can turn on me in an instant. It’s nothing personal, it’s just the sheer vast force of reality: it is a spinning, crazy, gorgeous, chaotic force and there is precious little you can do to hide from it or win over it. Lord knows we have tried. Much of history is us trying.

So yeah, my fears laid out loud would likely end in my being committed to the Coxwell East General psych ward where I’ve shipped most of my friends. But today is a day of Thanksgiving, a day to gobble up that harvest and pass it around the way those who welcomed us to this great land did here in Kanata. Fears are real, debt is constant, chaos is imminent- that’s absolutely normal. What about the gifts, the vast abundance of constant cool conveniences, awesome new tools for communication, incredible gifts from the imaginations of others past and present in art and cinema and literature, good bud, wonderful friends? I am blessed, I am blessed, I am blessed.

Here’s this year’s list, in no particular order.

I am grateful for the love and madness of my family. We are a special group and each member of it is so dear to me. I couldn’t ask for cooler nephews. These kids, David and Matthew, are just the best boys ever. They are smart, polite, creative, sensitive, inquisitive and kind.

I’m also so very grateful for my tribe, every last one of you. The characters who populate my life are extremely interesting people. I am so fortunate to be loved for who I am by a range of fascinating and talented friends.

I am grateful for the one man who changed everything for me. Without him, it is extremely possible that I still would not see. But I do see and I am blessed that I experienced the blowing of my mind.

I am thankful for old roses, when I can pick them up for a few bucks from a dude outside the subway and enjoy them for a night or two.

I am so thankful for Johnny Cash. Honestly, Cash is the epitome of cool from every angle.

I am thankful for being from the Madonna generation. We do not know historically what may have come of many human rights without her, because she has been here since our consciousness was forming. Would we be able to be girls and businesswomen and powerhouse creatives and queer and Christian and questioning and sexy and intelligent? There’s no way of knowing. I am this year, once again, thankful to Madonna. I am thankful that she shared her personal, political and spiritual evolution with us to empower the whole world to be all that we can be.

I am thankful for freedom. I am very thankful for Canada. We are fools who take Canada for granted. The criticisms we have of Canada merely indicate where we could help change things. People around the world are starving, being tortured, have been amputated by landmines and live hopping around in the desert: people are executed for their religion or their sexual orientation. People are being bombed. They are living in mountains built out of toxic garbage from computer parts, whole villages drinking poisoned water. Great, complain about the bus service or whatever, complain that you don’t like Britney’s new song. But today be thankful for freedom. FREEDOM.

I am thankful for Melinda Doolittle.

I am so thankful for Scrabulous and the fabulous scrabulous talents humbling me daily.

I am thankful for the wise hookers in Isabel Allende’s novels, and all the other amazing characters she recorded in her notebooks that bore witness to life.

And for being free at last from the sick poison of tobacco: thank you for my lungs and my skin and my relative health. And as for the health issues we do have: if you can’t be thankful for your arms because you lost one, then be thankful for the other. I’ll take whatever I can get. I’m thankful to be able to move around. I’m thankful for the hours when I’m not tired, and when I’m tired, I’m so thankful to Seinfeld for making me laugh. I love to laugh so very much!

I’m thankful for green tea and also for yummy coffee, for my reliable and efficient eMac, for Archie comics, and The Friendly Book (not to be confused with The Friendship Book, though that’s also nice for sweet little old ladies so I’m not knocking it!) I’m thankful for my belt that says ‘girl’ in rhinestones. I’m thankful that I’m allowed to paint now in this day and age without disguising myself as a man. I’m thankful for my Betsey Johnson flip-flops- wow, those are loud- and pink. I’m so ultra-thankful that this year that my special friend Paul- a blessing enough- took me to see Dolly Parton, fulfilling one of my life’s dreams.

And I’m thankful for the right words, at the right time.

Today I will be grateful because tomorrow, I know I will slip easily into bitterness, excessive complaint, overblown drama. Part of that is me just navigating fate, a sign of my full participation in a life that I am very, very thankful for.

Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others. Cicero