Belated Thanks to the Helpful Dead

Lots of folks observed Thanksgiving by publicly being thankful for a variety of things, and since that seems like a sanity–supporting thing I wanted to do so as well, for obvious reasons.

Friends and family first, of course.

Just being alive. And maybe not so of course. Never mind their circumstances, or whether they're generally upbeat or gloomy—how many people do you know who are consciously, explicitly grateful to have had the human experience inflicted on them? I've met people who are rich, who have other gifts, who are wise, who seem to get their desires fulfilled, who live well and happily, but I've never met anyone of whom I could say, "There—that person, the one right over there, that person is leading an easy life." Not once ever. When I was a kid, I didn't really understand why Shakespeare said that "to be or not to be" was a big important question. I figured that unless you were so miserable that you wanted to commit suicide, the answer was "to be," without a doubt. Now I see what Bill S. was talking about. Is it better, is it really better, to be a human being than it is to be a tree or a rock or nothing? How many people ask that question, or have the wherewithal to answer it honestly? I wonder. But yeah, I'm thankful to be here at the party.


There's lots of little things I'm thankful for after the big ones, of course. The other day it was foggy, and it turned the little town into a surreal dreamscape. Snow, too, is something that I'm grateful for. Color. Light. That the cat lived when he might have died. Hope and ambition. And the way Grey Poupon mustard tastes about as good as the imported kind, but doesn't cost quite as much. Big things and little things, and lots of both.

David Brooks had a pretty good column the other day about one's other education, the kind that you get from music and such—emotional education, he called it. I had been thinking lately along similar lines, but more about how all the wonderful artists whose work you experience in your life help you hear and see and so forth much better than you might have otherwise. Vermeer comes to mind—you see enough of his paintings, and you'll start to notice a certain lovely, magical kind of light in a room. He's long dead, of course, but his work can help your own life be richer—you'll be walking through the dining room one winter afternoon and just notice the way the light falls on everything, and it'll be still and luminous and special. "Like a Vermeer," you might say to yourself. Then there are all the photographers whose work demonstrates that you can be walking just anywhere—by the pond in the park, say—and see the clouds reflected in the water, and the wind making parallel lines in it, and a sprig of water plant tying it all together. Even those artists in Lascaux—you look at those vivid animal images and think about these people like us, but desperate to survive and faced with the need to take rocks and spears and try to kill beasts that were well equipped to flee or kill the hunters. It makes it a little easier to enter that cave dweller's mind, the next time you see a horse or a cow or a buffalo in a misty field.

I'm thankful for that kind of thing all the time, actually, but it was Thanksgiving the other day and I wanted to make sure I put that on my list. If the United States as a society made a bit more of an effort to appreciate this patrimony—maybe taught the arts in schools more seriously, for instance—I'd be grateful for that too.

Last and by no means least—I'm quite thankful for the people who stop by and see what I feel like chatting about. The numbers hit a record last month and we're not doing badly as November winds down, either. Thanks! I mean it.