Here we are again. Another circuit around the sun has returned us to the annual public ritual of giving thanks, about which I am a sap in a normal year (whatever that is), let alone the crisis management boot camp that has been 2022.
This collective practice of gratitude is compromised at its foundation, grounded as it is in colonialism and genocide. And in its particulars, each year, it is easy to play the skeptic. I am thankful that missiles fired into Poland did not mark the start of World War III – yet? I am thankful that the GOP has regained control of just the House and not the Senate? I am thankful that only 5 people were murdered at Colorado Springs gay bar, and not 50?
These are grim days in a country awash in guns and hate. And still here we are, giving thanks.
As Zoe toasted last night, at my second Thanksgiving gathering of the day: “I am thankful that my friends are alive.” And I could just leave it at that, because, really, that’s all there is. But a few months ago, when Paul was moving in and I was moving my office from the attic to the other bedroom, I unearthed something that reminded me of another mode of giving thanks.
On February 24, 2020, I started keeping what can only be described as a gratitude journal. I don’t remember why that particular day called for gratitude. I don’t even remember deciding to keep a journal, something I’ve never been good at in my life. The first entry is downright boring! It gives thanks for a healthy body, for a meeting that went well, and for the fact that I finally got to go to sleep. All reasonable to appreciate, especially that last, but nothing terribly compelling – though in retrospect the first is bittersweet, for obvious reasons.
Still, I kept this up for the rest of the calendar year, a year that just a few weeks into this practice became remarkable for far more interesting reasons than the depression that had motivated the journal in the first place. Covid makes only fleeing, oblique appearances. The entries are cursory, one sentence each, three sentences a day, stark and declarative, some fanciful, some loaded, some pretty pedestrian.
I am grateful to have fresh basil for my Aldi tortellini.
I am grateful for Swedish prestige drama.
I am grateful for this new pink mask.
I am grateful for ridiculous ducklings.
I am grateful I did not eat more of that edible.
I am grateful that I am still able to cry.
It goes on like this, line after line scribbled in the pages of a Moleskine daily planner whose purpose had become obsolete. Many of the events that inspired an entry have been lost. What happened on June 12 to make me “grateful for unexpected texts”? Whose texts? Why?
But some lines tap straight into memory’s pulsing vein. Such as, on July 24:
I am thankful for sandhill cranes on the river at dusk.
On July 24, 2020, I was canoeing with Paul. It was our fourth date – a two-day camping trip that was cut short the morning after the dusk and the cranes by a mote of sand in the eye that led us, after a few agonizing hours, to the emergency room in Boscobel, Wisconsin.
It’s a good story, one I’ve told many times, starting with the searing, dissociative pain of my scratched cornea, my stubborn insistence that we keep on paddling, and Paul’s insistence that we not. There’s always the detail of the chance encounter with a nurse in the parking lot of the Piggly Wiggly, mention of the small town medical staff who kept referring to Paul as my husband, and the happy aftermath, which involved cheeseburgers, lukewarm New Glarus, and a room at the Don Q Inn outside of Dodgeville.
It was the day, I say, telling the story, when I realized this was a good man. This was someone I could trust. This was someone I could love.
Less than two years later, in a Wisconsin park, he did become my husband, just ten days after the mammogram that upended our expectations of newlywed life. And I’ll tell you what: when you get married and get cancer all in one year, you get a lot of practice at giving thanks.
Over the course of this season of illness and joy, more than a few people have prefaced their wedding gifts or their cancer gifts with the insistence that no “thank you” is required. But the act of thanking them, of writing the card, or sending the text, or the email, or the Instagram message, has brought me so much pleasure. I worry that I have missed someone, or that my thanks have been inadequate, that there is no way I can reciprocate, but I have loved every minute of it. To crib from Marcel Mauss, it has bound me in community with all of them, creating a social contract with every giver that feels, now, like a tight-woven bed of webbing, ready to catch me when I fall.
And at the center of this web of support, there is, every day, Paul. When I started this newsletter I promised dispatches on love, cancer, and glitter but so far there has been an excess of cancer, and an understandable lack of glitter, but I have not given love its due. For me, it’s the hardest of the trio to speak out loud. it’s something I learned years ago not to long for with unseemly desire and which I came, over time, to stop expecting at all until suddenly, there it was, open and honest and true.
So here, in this compromised season of giving thanks, I want to give thanks out loud without qualification for Paul, and for love. I am so grateful for the place the river has brought us, just as I am grateful, more than ever, for my healthy body, and for all of you and all of yours. Because we are all still alive and, really, that’s all there is.
I wrote this long thing and then erased it by accidentally poof. Thank you and love you.
❤️❤️❤️