• Location: going to bed
• Mood: thankful
• Music: Charlie Rose

Dept. of Perspective

Thanks-giving.


My head's aching.

• My head is still on my shoulders, and it is often filled with wonderful thoughts, and sometimes I can spread them to people who like them.
  

My fingers are at the mercy of three different ailments, leaving them by turns painfully numb, yellow-white and cold; so swollen that they look like sausages and are painful to the touch; or afflicted with aching joints and skin battered into permanent soreness by lack of circulation.

• My fingers fit beautifully in Bob's. With my thumbs stuck in my ears, they wiggle very nicely. And they still handle a keyboard with surprising ease.

My little condo is far tinier, far less gracious than the place I once lived.

• My little condo is mine. Inside its wall are my books, my computer, my art, my memories, my cats, my best beloved and (occasionally) my first born. I have shelter from the storm, and I wish more people had that.

My cats have fleas and worms, despite my best and most expensive efforts to get rid of the parasites.

• I have cats, who sit on my lap, purr, and keep both my body and my heart warm.

My bank account's empty; that 15 percent pay cut has finally stripped the fat and the flesh, leaving the fragile bones. I have two more years to look forward to of overages, grocery- and gas-less weeks, and choices between this or that medication purchase.

• I have a bank account, where millions haven't, and I have friends who have helped me and mine over and over again, in ways that never cease to humble me. I will never be able to thank them enough, or repay them in any way that they deserve, and they still want to be my friend. How fantastic is that?

My job may disappear within the next year or so as the news industry undergoes what may be death throes or labor pains in the birth of something new.

• I have a wonderful job that continues to challenge me, and gives me the chance, I believe, to help and entertain people and strengthen local democracy. And I have the next year or so to prepare for another adventure.

My mother is old and I know I will have to bury her, realistically sometime in the next half-decade. I will lose one of my best friends.

• I have had, and still have, the world's most amazing mother; she is beautiful, kind, brave, and strong, and still comforts me when I cry. How lucky am I to have had her in my corner for 55 years? She will, I suspect, be with me forever. Silly death, to think it can take her from me.

I have nicely frakked-up brain chemistry. It tosses me in the dark places more than I'd like.

• I have medications and knowledge and doctors and a beloved husband who drag me back into the light each and every time. And my dark places do not compare with the dark places of others; I wish those others could have the support and stability with which I've been graced because, damn, no one should be left in the dark.

I live in this world, and it's filled with cruelty, and fear, and ignorance, blood, and greed, cupidity and venality large and small. The air is poisoned and the seas are dying, and spreading deserts are mummifying the good earth.

• I live in this world, and it is filled with children singing, and coffee, and stained-glass windows and doctors and nurses who worked to save my husband's life, and ice cream and books and rock and roll and Vermeer paintings and Chinese calligraphy and Uluru*and didgeridoos and ballet and Inuit sculpture and the Great Rift Valley and the Great Barrier Reef, and always, always, the hope of doing better tomorrow.
  

Thank you. Thank you all.

*Many thanks to st_aurafina