The week after Christmas has become a time of reflection for me, and with recent events fresh in my mind, I would like to end 2016 with a list of ten things I am thankful for.
1. To Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds, thank you for finding your way back to each other during your time on this earth. You survived times when one or the other behaved badly and still found a way to show each other how much you cared for one another. You are role models for all the mothers and daughters out there.
2. To Congressman Tim Murphy of Pennsylvania, Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson of Texas, Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, and the dozens and dozens of mental health advocates from D.J. Jaffe, to the folks at Treatment Advocacy Center, to Teresa and Anthony and Amanda and Kathy and Laura and Ilene and Joy and G.G. and Jennifer, and the rest of the gang. Thank you for working so hard to pass legislation to improve the lives of people with serious mental illnesses.
3. To my siblings. Thank you for coming to my house with your enthusiasm and appetites for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Without you, how would I celebrate the holidays?
4. And thank you for so thoughtfully leaving me so many of the scalloped potatoes. I admit that I DID complain after you took home almost every last shred of Thanksgiving left overs, leaving me only a little stuffing and pumpkin pie, neither of which I could eat because I am gluten and lactose free. Remembering the locust-like activity of that get together, for Christmas I had prepared two vast casseroles of scalloped potatoes, omitting the onions and substituting rice flour and lactose free milk for the wheat flour and cream that the recipe called for.(The Joy of Cooking said to use three pounds of potatoes for every six people. With 22 people expected, I had peeled and sliced ten pounds of them.) About seven pounds were left for my husband and I to enjoy this week. A nice change from chicken and white rice. So thank you.
5. To my husband and children, thank you for heeding my request for events instead of things for Christmas. I look forward to our dinners and shows in the coming weeks. (See item #1)
6. And to the dozen or so agents and small press publishers who declined any interest in my latest manuscript, thanks to you, as well. Even to the three or four who didn’t even send a rejection note, I am sure you were just worried about hurting my feelings. I know that the extra time I will now have to mull over what to delete, what to add, and where to simply try to “elevate the prose” will help make it a better book.
7. To Comedy Central and Jon Stewart. Thank you for giving me the gift of more sleep. Over the previous year I had stayed up too late watching Jon and Larry. Without those old buddies I am going to bed earlier and getting close to seven hours of sleep per night.
8. To Bosch dishwashers, for making an appliance that actually gets my dishes clean, and makes so little noise I can hardly tell it is on—although, I do wonder if it couldn’t have been possible to do this in less than two hours. Perhaps in the next model?
9. To my nutritionist, Amy, and whoever invented the FODMAP diet. Thank you for discovering that essentially everything I eat gives me gastro-intestinal distress. If I avoid not just wheat, shellfish and dairy, but also onions, garlic, apples, peaches, baked beans, honey, and a list of about thirty other seemingly random food items, I will feel great. Of course, this leaves little on my OK to eat list—primarily chicken and plain white rice—but there you go.
10. Which brings me to item number 10. To chicken. To all the chickens—and I should probably add rice plants—who have sacrificed and will sacrifice their lives so that I can eat homemade chicken and rice soup (with no onions, garlic, soy, wheat, MSG or high fructose corn syrup) everyday for the rest of my life, thank you. And now on to 2017
word from the trenches 