.
… And Happy Turkey Day, too also. I am reminding myself to be grateful that I finally have the replacement computer the Spousal Unit has been “getting around to” any time in the last year and a half, and if I am very lucky I will even be able to access my email by the end of the weekend. Also, this year’s Bloat is taking place less than an hour from our house, which means I can sleep in my own bed tonight, praise goddess. First World Hobbit Problems!
Today’s sermon, from E.J. Dionne:
Thanksgiving Day is awash in sentiment, but gratitude is not a sentiment. Itās a virtue. Itās certainly nice, but it is more than a feeling or an emotion. Properly understood, gratitude is hard because it entails both an admission and a demand.
A genuine sense of gratitude is rooted in the realization that when I think about all that I am, all that I have and all that I might have achieved, I cannot claim to have done any of this by myself. None of us is really āself-made.ā We must all acknowledge the importance of the help, advice, comfort and loyalty that came from others…
John F. Kennedy, whose life we celebrated and whose death we mourned again last week, offered a theologically ambiguous but highly useful injunction. It could be read as the testimony of a serious believer or as signaling, at best, faith in a very distant God. āHere on earth,ā Kennedy said in his inaugural address, āGodās work must truly be our own.ā…
A call to responsibility lies at the heart of gratitude. If faith without works is dead, gratitude without generosity of spirit is empty. By reminding us of how much we owe to others, or to social arrangements, or to fate, or to God, gratitude creates an obligation to repay our debts by repairing injustices and reaching out to those whom luck has failed. Gratitude is a response to acts of love. It demands more of the same ā nothing more, nothing less.
************
What’s on the agenda in your neighborhood today?
NotMax
(Repeating)
Celebrate with the best Hava Nagila video ever.
EZSmirkzz
Happy Hanukkah to you and yours also. Local news informed me it would a long time before the two holidays fall on the same day, I seem to recall it was in the thousands of years. This year I’m eating blackberries and pecans, in no particular order. One of life’s luxuries when the kids have flown the nest. Very little clean up too.
Peace.
SectionH
As a non-relgious person, that piece by EJ Dionne made me incandescently angry. Come on. I’ve never quote myself before, but I Mean Really!
(To my “liberal” Catholic male friend) Well, sorry, it started well, and in fact very much in tune with my thoughts earlier today. He lost me at the “It seems fair to assume that gratitude may come more easily to those who are religious.” Seriously?
I might suggest it’s fair to assume that there’s a preponderance of religious people in this country who assume the good fortune of their birth in this country, in privileged ethnic and economic groups, and often of the male gender, is a sign that they’re God’s Chosen, and need take no concern at all for the less fortunate. After all, that attitude goes back to the very beginning of this country. But I’d be wrong of course. Except, we can point to huge numbers of examples of My assumption every day, now, in this country.
The assertion that non-religious people are less adapted to gratitude really is a case that needs to be labelled “Offensive”.
If you want a topper, my friend (also Catholic) ‘splained to me that gratitude is a
Virtue. GIVE ME A FUCKING BREAK. Gratitude is a wonderful thing, and is so not tied to religious beliefs.
I responded by gently pointing out the “virtue” thing, and told him that I’m grateful for being friends with him and his wife. Because I am.
But wave EJ Dionne at me again, and I’m off.
SectionH
And honestly, I love Thanksgiving, and just taking a breath and being mindful (that’s someone’s semi-religious thing, or not, but it’s good anyway). It hurts me to watch it being eroded year by year.
noodler
Hey there Juicers, I am way too jetlagged after getting in from the middle east, and woke up at three. I’m on a three week break from Yemen, and thankful to be in NJ at my folks’ place. My sons are with me, whom I’ve not seen in six months and we’ve missed each other a lot, so it’s good. It’s great to be back here, but damn it’s a little too cold to golf.
SectionH
@noodler: Welcome home!
OzarkHillbilly
@SectionH: I’m with you here.
celticdragonchick
Turkey is in the oven now, and having breakfast of quick cherry/pineapple bread we made late last night.
Irish band Scythian having fun with Hava Nagila:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZ7ejdBzT04
OzarkHillbilly
I will spend most the day ignoring it and during the few hours I will be forced to acknowledge it, I will be resenting it with gritted teeth. 2 reasons: One, I could actually be accomplishing something. Two, I have to pretend that I respect other people’s religion when in reality I only respect their right to engage in whatever lunacy they choose to imbibe in.
In the road of life, Holidays are potholes.
raven
@OzarkHillbilly: It’ll be just fine here. This is the 7th Thanksgiving the princess, the dogs and I have spent at the beach alone. We’ll make a few calls later, have a nice traditional dinner and I’ll hit the beach when it warms up. Got reservations on a charter in the morning and friends are coming for the weekend. A little improvement in the weather and we’ll be good.
Evap
Sitting in my car waiting for the start of the Atlanta half-marathon. It’s freaking cold!!! I will run the race and then spend the rest if the day eating, guilt-free!
OzarkHillbilly
@raven: Well, I am certainly happy for you and all the others who will enjoy your day. Unfortunately, my ideal T-day is spent ridge walking several miles of Ozark wilderness, then making dinner over a fire and imbibing a little while enjoying a quiet winter’s eve with only the crackling of a fire and maybe a barred owl or 2 for company (and the wife).
Back when my parents were alive, I enjoyed T-day because I got to see most of my siblings. For as many reasons as siblings, death, MN, works in health care, has a catering biz, AZ, it just doesn’t happen any more. And this year I have to spend it with the step daughters inlaws, who are nice enuf folks, just not my kind of folks.
If I can get my mind right, it won’t be as bad as I am making it out to be. If I can’t…
Mustang Bobby
We’ve got a nice cool front coming through South Florida, dropping the morning temperature into the 50’s and giving us clear skies after five days of soaking rains. Going to do the slovenly thing until 3 when I go to dinner with friends; my contribution is a pumpkin pie from Publix. (Trust me, you don’t want me cooking for a group; I can burn water.)
There will be football on the big screen, a reminder of the years when we used to bundle up for the Thanksgiving game at Tiger Stadium (go Lions!) and politics. Fortunately all my friends are like-minded so there will be no need for the DNC study guide to knock down your Republican uncle.
Until then it’s the Castle marathon on cable.
debbie
@SectionH:
I’ve got to go and get cracking on the pie-baking, but reading your post, it seemed to me you were making Dionne’s point for him. Faith doesn’t have to involve religion, and religion doesn’t have to involve someone else’s idea of a god. It’s what you make of it for yourself.
If nothing else, gratitude demonstrates that things aren’t as bad as they might seem to be. And having weathered any number of dark moments, nothing’s helped me more than being more deliberate in being grateful for even small things.
I hope you enjoy your Fourth Thursday, however you spend it!
JPL
Happy Thanksgiving!
@Evap: Wave to my son’s significant other for me. There is no way, I’d run never mind watch, a marathon in this weather.
Raven
@OzarkHillbilly:
See here how everything
lead up to this day
and it’s just like
any other day
that’s ever been
Sun goin up
and then the
sun it goin down
Raven
@Mustang Bobby: 29 on the Panhandle
satby
First time in 5 years I’ll be with my sons today and my oldest son is cooking a huge turkey, his first one. But he’s a great cook so it should be fine. And though I normally am hugely offended when people presume that good is only done by religious people, the nod to “faith without works [being] dead” salvaged the blockquote for me. Dionne is talking about the hypocrisy of a lot of the religiosity in our public discourse, and any time that is called out I applaud.
c u n d gulag
Happy Thanksgiving one and all.
My agenda, is to hopefully take my mom home from the hospital today.
And hopefully, and then with thanks, my mom will be let out of the Hospital early enough to eat with the rest of the family, before she goes home with me.
She went in on Monday morning for chest pains.
She didnāt have a heart-attack, but a ācardiac incident.ā
They kept her for tests, and the test results are not good.
Not good at all.
I have to get ready to go to the Hospital soon to meet with surgeons. But the cardiologist at the Hospital didnāt think surgery is any sort of a real option ā thereās been too much damage to her heart, over the years.
Not stents, not bypass.
Sheās 81 1/2 years old, and what they can do, it try to keep her stable with medication.
Iām hoping that they release her in the early afternoon, so that she can spend Thanksgiving with the family. After talking about cancelling a family meal, my sister decided to make a mid-afternoon mini-feast, because if Mom stays in the Hospital, the family members who are travelling from Staten Island and NJ will want to see her anyway ā even if sheās still in the Hospital, so they might as well eat a nice holiday meal first, and then go visit.
And then, I hope to take her home.
Please keep her in your thoughts.
Raven
@c u n d gulag: white light to you all
OzarkHillbilly
@Raven: Nice. Where from?
satby
@c u n d gulag: Best of luck to you and your mom, c u n d gulag! We went through this with my mom (84) earlier this year. She herself decided against surgery, it can so often result in a lessor quality of life for the time they have left. And so far with medication she’s been happy, comfortable, and enjoying all her normal activities. I wish the same for your mom, and a speedy recovery!
Raven
@OzarkHillbilly: Black Peter, Dead.
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EltaVrViQwI&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DEltaVrViQwI
satby
@celticdragonchick: thanks for that! Shared with the Jewish contingent of my Irish family (the Blackhawk jerseys was a totally unexpected plus!)
OzarkHillbilly
@c u n d gulag: Hold her close, hold her tight.
@Raven: I never got into the Dead that much. Not sure why other than their propensity for jamming which to me always sounds like so much “As long as we can drag this out, we don’t have to try and remember another song.”
I feel the same about most jazz.
HRA
My thanks for sending the videos. I enjoyed them immensely.
Whatever your day today may you spend it with peace and pleasure.
Glidwrith
We are managing our third year with all homemade goodies for T-day. Improvements over previous years include biscuits that aren’t hockey pucks, cranberry sauce that hasn’t solidified into a rubbery mass in the bottom of the pan, non-soupy stuffing and hopefully this year gravy that won’t break.
The turkey is always perfect, however.
debbie
@c u n d gulag:
Hope your news will be good, or as good as it can be. When my mom was bed-bound in the nursing home, we snuck in bits of Thanksgiving food. She loved it, and the nurses and aides were happy to look the other way.
debbie
@OzarkHillbilly:
As much as I loved the Dead, I was gone the minute that jamming started. However, there are very few songs that are better than Ripple.
OzarkHillbilly
@debbie: Yep, I do like Ripple, and a few others which not being a Dead fan, I can not name.
R-Jud
I wasn’t going to make a Thanksgiving meal, but I opened the cupboard this morning to make breakfast and thought: what I REALLY want is stuffing.
2 hours and a trip to Sainsbury’s later, and I have everything in the oven. Should be ready when the Bean comes home from school.
Southern Beale
I made the most wonderful cheese sauce for the mac & cheese I’m bringing to family turkey dinner. I just had to share that.
rda909
How can you be thankful for anything when Eddie Snowden and Glennda the Good Snitch decided to live outside the U.S.A. to release their classified documents like candy to the rubes, and don’t want to come back now?!?! There’s a .00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001% chance a NSA intern might accidentally see an email you sent to mama while you eat huge feasts and sit on your tushies watching massive wide screen TVs all day and night, and you people are giving “thanks?!?!?” This is the most important issue of our time, and we can never be thankful for anything until we get that loser failure of a President out of the White House!1!111! Press on, my fellow white-privilege “progressives!!!”1!
Southern Beale
I also made an apple pie last night and I decided to throw a few dried cranberries in there with the apples just for laughs. Let’s see how that turns out.
Wag
@c u n d gulag:
To hopefully reassure you, don’t sweat that your mother didn’t get stents. There are lots of patients who do equally well or even better with medical management than they would have done with stents or surgery. In some hospitals she would have gotten stents whether it was the right thing or not. Be thankful she has a cardiologist who knows the difference.
SarahT
@c u n d gulag: Fingers crossed for your Mom and for your family to be able to celebrate together. Have been dealing with my 80-year-old Mom’s many hospitalizations for 3 years now (doctors have actually marked her charts as “Frequent Flyer”), & boy, does it suck. She’s home this week, at least, & for the first time ever has to trust the cooking to others – boy is she pissed off about it ! But the rest of us are just grateful to not have to bring Chinese Takeout to the hospital today. So yes, good thoughts to your Mom & your family – hope all goes well.
Josie
@debbie: Thanks for this. You said what I was thinking and expressed it beautifully.
Southern Beale
@c u n d gulag:
Sending good healing vibes your way.
Stents can be problematic, my mom had them (different kind, it was to drain fluid from the brain) and we found out that they are a point of infection. The tiniest infection — from a hangnail, even — can travel to the stent. You have to monitor these patients really closely. Eventually her stent did get infected and that’s what killed her.
Davis X. Machina
@Wag: Stents have outcomes that appear increasingly equivocal with each big study.
(IANAM.D, but I do watch Boston Scientific’s stock price. 17 today, 45 in ’05.)
dr. luba
SNow in the Motor City for Thanksgiving. And cold.
Off to bake a corn casserole, and then 2 pm dinner with 25 odd relatives. And some are very odd……
BTW, I’m having issues with BJ in Safari this morning. It loads, I see the page, and then–poof!–a white screen. It works in Chrome, though. I restarted and emptied caches, but still the same.
Is it me, or is this an issue?
Keith G
This has been my first Thanksgiving managing a neighborhood cafe/pĆ¢tisserie.Had a grea great (and intense) time getting our neighborhood’s dessert and pastry needs met.
After a very early morning round of dropping off goodies to friends, my agenda is built around avoiding all face to face human contact for the next 24 hours as I sip wine, watch movies, and eventually cook a personal seafood buffet, and emotionally prepare for the next 26 days.
An edit…
@rda909: Your run at humor notwithstanding, be chill.
dr. luba
SNow in the Motor City for Thanksgiving. And cold.
Off to bake a corn casserole, and then 2 pm dinner with 25 odd relatives. And some are very odd……
BTW, I’m having issues with BJ in Safari this morning. It loads, I see the page, and then–poof!–a white screen. It works in Chrome, though. I restarted and emptied caches, but still the same.
Is it me, or is this an issue?
Josie
@c u n d gulag: I hope for the best for you and your Mom. My father was in the same situation and was kept stable with meds for several years – much better than going through a tough surgery at an advanced age. It sounds like you have a good doctor.
dr. luba
Sorry for duplicate post. Nothing happened when I clicked the first time…..old story. Mods, please remove if you are so inclined. There is no edit feature for me today in Chrome.
Edit: except now there is, when I don’t actually need it. As always, FYWP.
Davis X. Machina
Turkey goes to the Weber for smoking at 3. It’s pies and sides until then… for those of us who cook more or less as a hobby-cum-craft-you-can-eat, this is our big day.
The rest of the year, we’re drones, bores, and on a good day, someone who’s doing a chore they’re glad they could hand off.
It’s like bagpipes — no one wants a bagpiper till there’s a funeral…
Dead Ernest
@c u n d gulag:
Very best of wishes for your Mom, for you, for the rest of your people.
A hearty ‘I Second That’ to Wag’s contribution at #35. It is quite likely that, for someone with her circumstances, medical management could be the optimal (and far superior) treatment for her comfort and function.
…not going to let it go ‘without saying’ – it’s quite clear that both you and your Mom treasure one another. Perhaps that may feel, for y’all, like it came easily, but whether it did or didn’t, in achieving that, I say; congratulations on your success! Way to live.
Keith G
@satby: Yeah, invasive procedures are not a guarantee to better outcomes in elderly patients. I have seen evidence of that reality in a few older family members.
Non-surgical treatments as well as plain old acceptance of a natural life course is so often the best way.
debbie
@Southern Beale:
Can you share what you put in your cheese sauce to make it so good?
TaMara (BHF)
So I don’t think anyone but the BJ crew will understand this, but since my cat is still very sick, I cancelled my travel plans and am staying home.
Cooked my own turkey and will live off leftovers the whole weekend and make pots of soup all next week.
WereBear
We’ve increased our “orphan’s Thanksgiving” by another couple this year, so that’s six of us who don’t see each other enough.
Off to a local hotel buffet where the servers confide that the tips are great, the cooks are mellow because of the limited menu, and there is a huge party for them after, (eating the leftovers from buffet & -ahem!- bar) so no worries.
And we orphans are grateful there’s no cooking or cleanup!
WereBear
@c u n d gulag: Sounds like she is actually doing well, all things considered. May your wishes come to pass.
@TaMara (BHF): How can you enjoy yourself if you are worried? Thanksgiving, after all, is what we make of it.
There are no rules save gratitude.
GHayduke (formerly lojasmo)
@Wag:
As a cath lab nurse, and former cardiac surgical ICU nurse, I endorse this. Lots of good to be done with medicine.
rikyrah
Great post over at The Obama Diary:
A Thanksgiving Rise and Shine: 50 Thank Yous to the President
By utaustinliberal
http://theobamadiary.com/2013/11/28/a-thanksgiving-rise-and-shine-50-thank-yous-to-the-president/
nastybrutishntall
Are Aducation Sistim iz Brokken. I weap 4 awl of uss.
http://www.denverpost.com/outdoors/ci_24608030/mallard-migration-nears-peek-dark-geese-come-into
Another peek, captured: http://i1237.photobucket.com/albums/ff475/copfeel/peek.jpg
SiubhanDuinne
@NotMax: That’s … amazing.
SiubhanDuinne
@c u n d gulag: All good thoughts to your mother. I hope she can remain comfortable, and I’m sure seeing family will be excellent medicine. The warmest and most healing of Thanksgiving wishes to mama gulag and everyone who loves her.
SiubhanDuinne
@TaMara (BHF): I think you made the right — indeed, the only — decision. All good wishes for your kitty’s recovery.
SiubhanDuinne
@rikyrah: That made my day!
divF
@c u n d gulag:
I savor your comments (screeds? :) ) on this blog and Washington Monthly, so let me add to everyone else’s hopes for good fortune and the best possible outcome for your Mom. Dr. Madame divF is a geriatrician, and a great believer in the dictum “Primum non nocere”, particularly for the elderly. I sounds like your mom’s doc also got that memo.
@SectionH:
Yeah, EJ’s belief in the superior moral education that comes from a religious upbringing can be a pain at times – humane moral standards can come from many sources, both religious and secular. Nonetheless, speaking as a lapsed (since 16) Catholic, Catholicism often does provide a more broadly valuable moral upbringing. I went to a Jesuit high school in DC in the 60’s, and the upstanding men who taught me instilled in me, by both their words and their actions, a consistent moral compass, which I try to follow even without the appendage of an invisible Sky Buddy. The last two grafs in AL’s posting speak to the heart of that moral training. Pope Francis, a Jesuit of the same generation that taught me, is also speaking emphatically to that same set of issues.
divF
@divF:
Also, thanksgiving for me is tomorrow, with all the in-laws coming to our house, as we’ve done for the last 20+ years.
Yatsuno
@NotMax: Chag Hanukkah Samayach!!!
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
I’m grateful for the MST3K Turkey Day marathon being webcast today (http://www.mst3kturkeyday.com). Gives me warm and fuzzy feelings of college Thanksgivings.
Plus the very first one they’re showing reminds me of the first weekend trip G and I took together. “She’s presenting like a mandrill!”
Davis X. Machina
@divF: They made not a few social democrats then, in an age when it was not popular….
Everybody in my freshman class at a Jesuit high school was driven through The Other America, like it or not. Some of the people from money, especially new money — prosperous and lucky second, third generation immigrants (how do you say ‘alrightnik’ in Irish? Or Italian?) — were not happy with this. Or the service project at the end of senior year. Or a lot of other things… They wanted the clock to have stopped in 1953.
Dom Arrupe said “…our prime educational objective must be to form men-and-women-for-others” and that was that.
Interrobang
Happy Thanksgiving to those of you in the US (our Thanksgiving here was on the 8th of October), and chag Hanukkah sameach to those of you lighting candle #2 tonight.
(On December 2, spare a thought for the family of Noah Posner, who was shot in Sandy Hook on the 6th day of Hanukkah — that family will always have two sad anniversaries.)
c u n d gulag
YAY!
Mom’s home!!!
Thank you one and all for your kind thoughts, and wishes for white light.
It took some convincing, but she actually decided to go the my sister’s house, where most of the remaining family was starting to gather.
She didn’t want to go, because she hadn’t showered, and ‘her hair was a mess.’
I reassured her the only thing everyone cared about, was that she was with us.
Thank you all, again. :-)