Tom’s 2022 Thanksgiving Thankful List

Tom’s 2022 Thanksgiving Thankful List

– By Tom Garrison –

Each November. I compose a “Thanksgiving Thankful List” for the preceding year. My wife, Deb, and I enjoy our life in red rock, southern Utah, and have many things for which we are thankful. I hope sharing them brings a smile and acknowledgment that even the seldom thought can be a source of thankfulness. Below is my 2022 list.

1. I’m thankful for whipped cream. Nothing tops off a wonderful Thanksgiving like having a small piece of pumpkin pie on my plate of whipped cream. Of course, whipped cream goes with many foods—pie, ice cream, jello, and so on. It is important to obtain the proper ratio of whipped cream to ice cream, jello, or whatever. My experience is that the proper ratio is about three units of whipped cream to every unit of pie. This necessitates having multiple cans of whipped cream for the meal—you wouldn’t want to deny others their share of the creamy nectar.
2. I’m thankful for glasses, the kind you put on your face to see. When my contact lenses are out, the glasses help me avoid running into walls. Well, most of the time.
3. I’m glad someone invented toothpicks. Picture this; you’ve just finished a wonderful meal consisting of a 16-ounce porterhouse and a bunch of other unimportant stuff. All is good in the world except for the forest of minute pieces of meat filling the gaps between your teeth. No problem, whip out your trusty toothpick and get to work dislodging your second helping of meat. If you are in a restaurant, you can also use the little plastic swords that come with some food as a toothpick.
4. I’m thankful for paper towels. You make a small mess and rip a rectangle or two from the roll and clean it up. If I had to use a cloth rag to clean up my messes, it would not be a pretty sight, considering how many messes I make in a typical week. At the end of a week, using cloth rags, I would have a mound of rags nearly as tall as I am (six feet, one inch). Water used to clean rags would probably amount to most of what’s left in Lake Mead.
5. I never thought I say this, but I’m thankful for “pronouns” being such a “woke” thing.

I’m lousy with names; just ask my wife. Unless I see a person fairly often, the odds are good that I won’t remember their name. I’ll usually remember that I have met them, but the name is almost always elusive.

Then comes along “wokeism”—a hyper version of political correctness. Included in wokeism is the idea that some people do not want to be identified by their sex. So, at least some of them adopt and ask others to use cumbersome pronouns like “they” instead of their given name.

Given my lousy name memory, this is great. I can interact with someone I’ve already met and simply keep using the pronoun “you” (“you” is a second-person pronoun) instead of their name, which I don’t remember anyway. Thus, wokeism allows me to avoid embarrassing social faux pas. Who would have thought such a stupid component of Left ideology had a positive aspect?

6. I’m thankful for growing up in the 1950s and ‘60s, and I’ll include the ‘70s. (I was born in 1952.) The music was great. Can any singer top Grace Slick (of the Jefferson Airplane) belting out “White Rabbit?” Or how about Mick and the boys (Rolling Stones) throwing energy bolts with “Street Fighting Man.” And Roy Orbison is spinning one of his ballads like “Pretty Woman.” Or the king, Elvis (not Elvis Costello), shaking it up with “Jailhouse Rock.” And don’t forget the Motown sound of groups like The Supremes and The Temptations.

I can’t name a single song in the last 20 years that comes anywhere near the energy and often eloquence of tunes from the 1960s and ‘70s. Can you? I’ll take Grace Slick or Janis Joplin any day over Lady Gaga.

7. There are many reasons to be thankful for our cats, Bob and Willa. A seldom acknowledged one is that they continue to educate us about all important body language or non-verbal communication. We can’t communicate much verbally to them—their name and maybe a few commands. We don’t even know if they understand; it is unknowable.

It is the same for them talking to us. Even though we often talk to them, and they talk to us, verbal communication is sketchy at best.

According to experts, cats can vocalize more than 100 different sounds. But none of them are, “I’m hungry; feed me.” We humans have to figure out what they are saying. Since cats do much of their communication through body language, it behooves us to learn that language.

Is a cat okay when its ears are back? Nope. How about that twitching tail? Leave them alone for a while. And when they rub against your legs? That is a good thing.

I’m thankful Bob and Willa keep me focused regarding non-verbal communication as a part of overall communication. It comes in handy when communicating with cats and often with humans. Thus, because of my study of cat non-verbal communication, I now know that when another human takes a swipe at me with their paw, I mean hand, things are a little tense between us.

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