A Few Words of Thanks…

I’m going to be preoccupied with various things including making a couple of vats of cranberry sauce over the next few days (recipes will be supplied upon request), so in advance of the day we commemorate our forebears’ gratitude for surviving one especially tough winter, I wanted to list a few things in this world for which I am thankful. After my family, friends and faithful readers, of course…

• Lidocaine patches
• Even if I don't start a new novel for a while, the knowledge that a number of them still exist inside my head (and damn, it’s getting crowded in there).
• On-line shopping
• My physical therapist
• The New York Times Crossword Puzzle (except on Friday and Saturday)
• Spring peepers
• The occasional well-written sitcom that sneaks through the ratings guillotine (in other words, network execs are COWARDS for canceling “Arrested Development.”)
• Hot showers
• The way trees sound immediately after the rain stops
• The following writers, in no particular order: TC Boyle, Joyce Carol Oates, John Irving, Anne Tyler, Tom Perrotta, Michael Chabon, and, for fun, Janet Evanovich.
• Herman Edwards is no longer the Jets’ coach
• Cars that start
• That writers can now get their words in front of a lot of eyeballs without the traditional “gatekeepers”
• National Public Radio. Especially Garrison Keillor.
• Those three little words: “Two More Years”
• Any movie with Sean Connery
• Vanilla candles
• That I live in a country with indoor plumbing, basic human rights, no worries that I’m going to step on a land mine on the way to the grocery store, and that we are so fat and happy that watching people eat Madagascar hissing cockroaches for money actually passes for entertainment.

And what could be better than that?

Happy Thanksgiving!