Lucky Me

I don't remember the first Thanksgiving I spent as a single person. I know my friend Jobird H. invited me to Thanksgiving with his family, but I didn't go. I may have been wallowing in self-pity, not sure, but I'm guessing I spent it by myself, in my new home. It was probably all right. Maybe even enjoyable.

Thanksgiving number two, I drove to Fargo, to be with boyfriend number 1. He had the nicest family, they were all great. He was himself. We parted ways about a month later.

Thanksgiving number three: I was living at the Cowboy's house, and we worked our Thanksgiving dinner in around a couple of days when he returned from Texas. We went to Molly Cools for seafood on Wednesday night, and he left the next day. The weather was uncertain. Our future was uncertain. We parted ways shortly after that. I was back in my own house before Christmas.

Hey, I never said this would be as interesting as Elizabeth Taylor's memoirs. Just bear with me here.

Thanksgiving number four: I am about as happy as I have ever been in my life. Things are good, life is wonderful, and I have an awful lot to be thankful for.

I thank God when something good happens to me. I talk to God a lot. I really don't pray gracefully or in a very reverent sort of way. I pray fervently though, and candidly.

(I also pray fast, and can recite a rosary in record time. I'm not sayin' I'm proud of it, and it's not to achieve some kind of speed award, but just an adaptation to fit it into my busy life.) I often ask God for some help, or a push in the right direction. There are times too, when I've had to completely give up on trying to sort through a problem, and instead, just hand it off to God. This is something you learn as you to do as you get older and wiser. You have to be okay with bending your ego.

His answers have very simply fallen into place in my head. Solutions that I never would have thought of.

I've had a lot of good answers from God this year, gigantic stuff. Miraculous stuff.

Thank you Lord, for the big stuff. And the small stuff. And for family and friends. I've been blessed to be surrounded by people with huge, wonderful, caring hearts, who love me.

For this life I live, with all of you - I'm lucky, I'm grateful. I'm thankful.

Mealtime

Mom has always known her way around a kitchen, and that was a good thing, because Dad was kind of a picky eater. We ate home cooked, home canned, farm raised, garden gathered, food. Dad liked big meals with all the trimmings - meat, potatoes, vegetables, home baked bread, six kinds of pickles, and some sort of delicious dessert.

Unlike a lot of Minnesotans, we didn't have many hot-dishes, or things like sloppy joes, and we would have died-and gone-to-heaven to have pizza once in a while. (And that would have been the kind of pizza that came in a small box - where you mixed up the dough and added the tiny can of tomato paste - it would have been unheard of back then to buy a frozen pizza.)

Breakfast was a big meal at our house too. All of us kids knew how to fry eggs, and that was a standard. Mom would make hot cereals, cooked on the stove. (The kind where you add hot water to oatmeal in a little pouch had not been invented yet. Or more correctly, it actually had been - it simply came in a bigger box, and you had to measure it out into the pan...) She would make sausage and gravy, bacon and pancakes. Or a giant pot of homemade hot chocolate. We couldn't have coffee, but we could have hot chocolate.

On weekdays, Dad got up long before we kids, so he could drive to his job in Brainerd. But on weekends when we were all there for breakfast, Dad would always let us dip our peanut butter toast into his cup of coffee. He ate his toast the same way.

It has recently occurred to me that his coffee cup must have been half full of soggy toast crumbs, not to mention the germs from the hands of all us grubby little children. He never said anything about it - and this was a man whose dresser drawers were sorted and arranged into neat sections of socks, handkerchiefs, t-shirts, etc. We were just always welcome to dip right in to that cup of coffee.

Over the years, Dad and Mom have had to adjust their eating, as health dictated, and age and weight, and those big home cooked meals don't happen all that often anymore.

And Dad's been eating hospital food for the past couple days. I suppose it's not too good, but I haven't heard him complain.

This afternoon, he's not feeling all that great. One of his major meds had accidentally slipped off the list, and as a consequence he's been having facial spasms, extremely painful. Between that, and some different meds they gave him to relax and eliminate some of the face pain, he's been very groggy, and shaky.

They also wouldn't give him anything to eat until someone looked at the ultrasound he had earlier, so when he could finally have something, he asked for peanut butter toast and coffee. The styrofoam coffee cup was full and he has to eat while inclined, and with a perilously shaky grip on the cup. Pat mentioned getting a lid for the cup, so it wouldn't spill so easily, but he either didn't hear her or didn't want one, as he didn't really respond to the suggestion. She went out and down the hall to the break-room and got one, and was just reaching across the bed tray to put it on the cup, when she saw why he didn't want one. He broke his peanut butter toast in half, reached up to the cup on the tray, and dipped it way down in.

Old habits sometimes just don't need breaking.

Road Trip

My family ends up in hospital waiting rooms quite often, as Mom has been dealing with health issues for many years. Sort of feels like home after you've been here awhile. The St Cloud hospital is one of the most professional and courteous I have experienced.

So here I am, with Pat, Barb, Julie and Mom, in one of the waiting areas in the hospital, doing some writing while Dad takes a nap. He just got a bath, clean bedding and a back rub from the nurses, so I'm thinking he'll be sleepin' like a baby for a while. He has a low grade fever today and will likely get a pacemaker implant tomorrow, provided the fever dissipates.

Usually Dad is on the waiting room end of these hospital visits, and I was remembering the time when Mom became extremely ill while they were on vacation a few summers ago. They'd gone to a family reunion in Sioux Falls, and Mom was in such bad shape that Dad called us to come down there. So 'the girls' (Pat, me, Barb and Julie) all crammed into Julie's little car, and headed out into the night. It seems that even if you have time to pack a bag, there are always a few things you forgot to bring, or ran out of while you're away. This is why a lot of our pajamas are from Walmart.

Anyway, because Dad packs for vacation like most men, with just the most minimal amount of clothes, by the time we got to the hospital in Sioux Falls, and it became obvious that Mom would be there for a while - he needed to get out to make some extra clothing purchases.

A small warning bell dinged off somewhere in the back of my brain, but I ignored it. Which is probably why - when we reached the mall, Barb and Julie made a hasty beeline off to the other end of the mall, (to look at shoes, naturally) leaving me to help Dad find the stuff he needed. Dad's not a big shopper, I guess Mom probably buys most of his clothes, and a feeling of dread and slight panic swept over me when Dad said, "Well, I guess I need some shirts. I like those T-shirt shirts, you know, with a pocket on the front. And stripes, this way." While motioning his arms to indicate horizontal stripes.

Wonder of wonders - and thank you Jesus - there happened to be a big table of such shirts at Kohl's. We picked out a few and Dad tried one on. In the store. Right next to the table. Then posed, pooching out his belly, and asked, "Does this look too small for me?" We had more stuff to get and needed to get back to the hospital in due time. I said they looked great.

Onward to socks. You'd think this would be an easy one, but he had a particular kind in mind, and more complexly - a certain calf height. Not too high and not too low. Those seem to have too tight elastic. Those have a grey toe and heel. Etcetera. Finally found some that fit the bill.

I was hoping he had brought enough underwear, because I really just didn't want to go there. Alas, to the underwear aisles we trod. This was the worst, because while I don't mind a quick grab and buy, I did not want to browse the men's undie aisle. With my dad. We looked at a lot of different styles, and although he seemed sure of what exact type he wanted (and I really had no inclination to learn what type of unterwasche he wore) we couldn't find the right ones. He finally found a package of underwear that *seemed* close to the right kind, judging from the photo on the front. But he was hesitant to choose them because they were labeled 'fitted knit boxers' and he knew his were called 'boxer-briefs.'

Our shopping was finally completed. It has always stuck in my mind though - how we were able to find all those items exactly like he what wanted. Maybe guardian angels cover more ground than we think. ;)