Be Glad of it All

Here’s why I’M thankful on this last day of the long giving-thanks weekend:1. I don’t have to peel anymore slimy flesh off a turkey. The soup's all made and I'm done sifting through gunk to find the tiny bones.2. I’ve decided I’m not going to even TRY doing the dreaded Holiday Card until January since I have new book just published and it'll be all I can do to get the word out about that.3. The book is an audio book so I didn’t have to annoy the socks off my whole family by asking them to read it for errors. I just closed myself up in a back bedroom with some fancy sound equipment last summer and let fly – and amazingly enough it doesn’t seem to embarrass me to listen to it because my old pal Roger Baker out in Albuquerque not only took out all the swallows and lisps and hiccups but also added original music between the ‘cuts’ so it’s all pretty and nice.4. I can actually SORT OF of swing a golf club even though my spine is twisting up like a contortionist with this secret scoliosis I didn’t even know I had, never mind a neck with so much joint-degeneration in it the guy doing the X-rays in at Mass General in October said, “Wo! Whadja, fall out of a tree or something?” I’m taking these lessons and my head hasn’t fallen: amazing.5. I’m not sure but I THINK I’m getting to be less of a workaholic. The whole neck problem comes from being such a wonk all my life, actually hand-writing term papers in fancy Old English script in high school, taking notes on my notes all through college, bringing entire pieces of furniture on ski vacations to strip and refinish them. (Picture it ! Whole SETS of chairs! Entire bureaus!) Last night before supper I was able to spend a whole hour locked in a locked closet with my four-year-old grandson without once feeling like Patty Hearst or panicking about all the emails I wasn’t answering. A little later I asked him if he wanted to hear the world’s greatest tenors and put on a CD which I had thought was Luciano Pavarotti and Placido Domingo but which turned out to be the soundtrack to the Kenneth Branagh movie of Hamlet. “Where’s all the singing?” I said after we'd listened for a good two minutes. “Shhhh! TT” whispered my little friend, putting his finger to his lips. “This is just the part where the curtain is going up!” I liked that. I really liked that, because it reminded me to feel thankful AND glad AND lucky that...6.Yet again this morning whatever shape we find ourselves in, that big old curtain went up for us all.