Hopefully Dear Reader is enjoying his horn of plenty during this, the season of thanks.
I’m not sure why the horn of plenty amuses the modern brain. Maybe its cutesy “The people of the Land had enough to eat!” artistic rendering looks generally corny. And that old-tymey wording, “horn of plenty.” Whatever the reason, a horn of plenty is a wondrous and comical thing.
For it we give thanks. As a people of many nations, we are thankful together for the bounty of this yearly American feast. And for old movies we will watch afterwards with lines like, “It’s just not right, I tell you!” sputtering from earnest and exasperated men in hats fighting for justice with the charming naïveté of tymes gone by. Who knows if tymes were ever really like that…let us think so and be content. We are thankful for every moment of contentment we can squeeze out of anxiety-provoking modern tymes. Those of us entering the Big Jewelry Years (due to growing knuckles, noses, ears) are grateful for a holiday function whereat we can wear same. And that we’re getting old enough for such parts to grow, which means we are in fact still alive.
There is much about gratitude in print these days. So I conducted an informal poll of the Land. The query, “What are you thankful for?” reaped interesting and heartfelt responses, largely from strangers, including:
Family; my cozy bed; the farmers who grow our food, especially the organics; books; my companion, 
The Schluffer (a cat); snow; the community in my church; that I’m able to walk; people blowing horns; how humans can overlook their differences for the sake of community; my family both at school and at home; the parents’ wallet; I have a hot husband; gluten; the opportunity to immigrate to the United States and my happy life here; that my son has a dog; girl scouts; my beautiful wife; “to eat”; my family; the pleasure of making the letters J and F in cursive, which may become obsolete; that spiritually bankrupt people have consumerism to fill the void; sarcasm; young faces eager to learn; my beautiful daughters and that I have a job; my health; my ear muffs; music. The front runners? Family and community.
My family and community includes the crazed nutters I call friends, including the illustrious and sharp-dressing Viscomte de Villainy, who have stuck by me through thick and very, verrry thin. I am thankful for them, and for how people’s faces change when they smile. And for my blood family, who are definitely nuts. And for a special chipmunk at Silver Lake this summer, an alert little feller named Scamp who roamed the grounds freely with a cheerful, magical insouciance in broad daylight– no shady rock walls for him! We are not thankful for the raptor that likely picked Scamp off, loveable easy target that he was.
With the holidays approaching, I am among those thankful for the opp to spend money. It’s always scrimping and saving in modern tymes, isn’t it? Wondering if the income will stop, what new disaster will cripple us monetarily. Gift giving becomes an even more guilty boggler when in magazines and TV and radio, it’s all, “Have less stuff. Get rid of your stuff. Stop having stuff. No stuff!” I for one like to wrap stuff. And give it. As a present. My solution? Gift people with experiences (tickets to a show, a subscription to something) and other stuff that can be used up. I’ll stop or Dear Reader might guess his gift. Can’t have that.
I add in closing sincere thanks that humans can’t think of everything all the time, try as we might. So some bad things get little air time. Like that tiff at work or the altercation at the dump. When we think on it, it’s galling (Treated unfairly? Flubbed a reply? Acted rudely?), but eventually, well, other thots encroach. Thank you, Lord. Because we do not need to dwell on dumb garbage.
We prefer pleasant thots. Thots about…cornucopias. Or: Maybe I won’t dress so shabby for the big meal this year. Make an effort. Do something new. A new charitable effort. Giant earrings. Angel food cake instead of pie. Something.
Wherever you are, blow your horn – with a charming naïveté, a magical insouciance…however you want to play it. Blow a few notes my way. I’ll be listening for you. Good birdin’ and good day.
formation. Notices from Linked In—who cares?! People who think Facebook solves all communication situations; people who change their portrait daily. Social media: enough already. When people haven’t tested equipment/remotes for their PowerPoint or whatever and it doesn’t work; for the love of God, go in EARLY! Phony, planted e-mails like “A great company is interested in you!” When my long e-mail disappears just before I hit Send. The buffering signal cycling while waiting for the Internet to do something. PASSWORDS. And [from a tech genius:] People who refuse to make an effort to understand technology.
at said WATCH IT GROW (watch what grow, the cubic volume of garbage? A Bud Light tree?) The kindly lady I worked with had somehow hauled a mattress into her truck, after days of rain. New Englanders are tough, man.
deals people some pretty bad hands. Whether it’s a physical affliction making life a living hell, or a heart so broken you can’t inhale, it almost doesn’t matter whether it’s happening to you or someone you love. When you love someone, their pain becomes yours. As anyone who’s watched their beloved person die will tell you, at some point they wished they could trade places with their suffering person. Even though watching it unfold—and enduring its aftermath in a daze—likely hurt worse.
eaning I think that people at the time believed these things were happening, and whether they did or did not occur is not important to me. What matters to me is that humans today get together to honor those that were beacons of kindness a really long time ago, to give thanks to something bigger than we, to whisper wishes for those in need, and that there’s a place you can go where you can leave your purse unattended and probably no one will go through it. Our religious affiliation is typically decided by our parents; that a single religion is The Right One is to me as perverse as the notion that Christians were born sinners whose sometimes unbaptized children languish in Hell or 
have a lowly 30. If you’ve never wound a bobbin on a sewing machine before, you’re missing out. If mankind wound more bobbins, there’d be less misery and lower crime rates.
uppervalleygirl 