Becoming Thankful & Why I Love Lizbeth Salandar

Katherine today.

For the last 38 years I've been making stuffing this time on Thanksgiving morning.   For a lot of those years I've been listening for Franny noises that have been intentionally timed, by me, to lure her with the smells of sausage browning for that stuffing (always her favorite Thanksgiving food) so she would come to the kitchen and cook with me in between the yearly attempts Jim made to keep the kitchen clean during this process.  In recent years there were Bloody Marys and Ken too.  Nate is never here on Thanksgiving and Chris's family has so many families to take care of, we see them when the stars align and the stars have been pretty generous until this year.

We usually feed anywhere from fifteen to twenty-five folks.  We like it.  It's our best holiday because it highlights what we love to do.  Zack, grandson, told me while I was driving him to high school last week (I keep aging before my very eyes) that he would miss our food this year.  He really likes our food.  He knows how to get Granny's attention.  He will get a turkey dinner for his birthday in February.

This year everyone went elsewhere for wonderful reasons.  So there's us and there's my mom.

There were other complications.  Our twenty year old stove was beginning to behave like the old tiger in We Bought A Zoo--it was time to put it out of its misery.  The convection function of the oven died at Thanksgiving last year and baking anything longer than 30 minutes was a crapshoot.  We finally got our act together and actually looked at and purchased a new stove.  Cool.  The model we wanted had to be specially ordered, of course, and they would shoot for delivery before Thanksgiving.  Not so cool.

The freezer part of the fridge failed next.  It was thirty years old.  We bought it when we got this house.  I had an exciting afternoon dreaming of ice makers and those cool insets in the doors of other people's refrigerators where water and ice cubes and crushed ice can be dispensed without the inconvenience of opening doors.  The anticipated existential crisis over choosing a  drinking water approach several times a day was almost tingly to me. Then we went appliance shopping and realized we could downsize our size thinking when it came to a fridge and get one that would not require lots of cabinet remodeling along with the purchase of a new fridge.  We found ourselves an old fashioned fridge with a plain freezer on the top.  It's stainless like the rest of the stuff, but its small and it fits in the space we have.  It was, however, not available and had to be ordered.  They would shoot for delivery before Thanksgiving.  Counting on appliances for Thanksgiving was not a happening thing.

The gods had sent their message.  Take the year off.  Take your mom to a restaurant.  She likes restaurants.  We're going to The Fort.  I just hope it doesn't feel like the Christmas morning we were in the San Diego airport.  That was bad.  Right now this is pretty strange, but there's a lot of good right now and it's time to settle into becoming thankful.

As always, a list:

1.  Jim.  For Everything.  For making an old lady like me feel like a girl, for baking me a pumpkin pie later today, for introducing me to opera (La Traviata is playing in the background), for starting the new Van Gogh jigsaw puzzle on the coffee table downstairs reviving an old tradition when the kids were here, for just everything.

2.  For the kids and grandkids.  For the good friends we have.

3.  For the French Dip sandwich at Lou's Food Bar, the steamed pork belly buns at Bones, and Park Burgers.

4.  For Saturday mornings at Snooze.

5.  For the porch of our cabin up in the Tetons, my bliss station.

6.  For my Teton friends all over the country who are called to that part of the world and Jenny Lake Lodge and have some sort of esprit de corps about the place.  I want to remember that no matter what, it's those mountains and bathing in the woods that make me whole each year.  The goal is to get there more, not less.

7.  For the delivery of the stove and fridge last Thursday.

8.  For Jim and Bud getting the sink in on Tuesday.  It took all day and quite the bluster of swearing, but it's in.  It doesn't leak.  The garbage disposal works.  It looks cool.  The water pressure is amazing.  I love the sink.

9.  Oddly, for Lizbeth Salandar.  I've been through two bouts of the flu since my flu shot.  Jim and I both missed getting outside our hotel room in Chicago with a flu.  We went through it again, or something horribly similar, a week after we got home at the end of our week with Chris's kids.  Lizbeth Salandar got me through the second bout.

They've been replaying The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo on cable a lot recently and as I've tried to sleep (it's really hard to do when running to bathroom), I've had the movie on.  I loved the books with Lizbeth, but I've had some real time to think about her in my flu-ridden state.

Lizbeth represents many things I abhor and yet I love her.  She is guided by justice and revenge and I've spent my life trying to move myself over to the mercy side of the duality.  She takes care of lot of buried vengeance about my own loss of innocence.

She is brilliant and can glance at things and know them.  She loves research and I don't.  I have a lot to say about education, but the kind of research needed to say it stops me easily.  Jim loves it.  I am a fictional girl.

Lizbeth breaks little and big rules.  She kills people on the big side of things and she ignores no smoking requests even from Mikael on the smaller side of things.  She doesn't worry about these choices.  She thinks it's absurd to feel guilty about smoking--it is a need to her.  It's interesting that she asks Mikael permission to kill Martin Vanger.  Why does she ask this time?

Enough.  I shouldn't like her.  I do.  I'm grateful there's a fictional girl out there killing my boogiemen.

10.  I am thankful for the upcoming trip to the New York City in April to see Nate and Ashley, to go Metropolitan Opera, to go on one of Nate's food tours, to meet up with Franny's family there too.

11.  For my country and its people.  For being in Chicago, and healthy that one day, this election day and in the hotel where the President was living through it all.  I rode down the elevator for 27 floors with David Axelrod and he remembered Franny and I had such a wonderful Mom moment.  We took Willa for a sushi lunch (our first real outing--we made it to the hotel lobby) and met Franny's White House cohorts.  Wonderful.

12.  For Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell.  Lots of wonderful tidbits that I don't seem to let go of--a fun and interesting and scientific read.

12.  For Daniel Martin by John Fowles.  My fifth reading and third copy.  The first was a problematic paperback.  The print was too small and the last fifteen pages were missing.  I bought a used hardback and left it in Chicago.  I found another hardback in the basement that we thought we'd given away years ago.  I may finish this reading by May.  I love this book though.  It's the Huck Finn of my old age I guess.

13.  For knitting.  For my own bed.  For my TV and all the stupid stuff I watch.

14.  For being here.  For being alive.  I put up with a lot of physical stuff because of radiation.  I complain too much.  It's good to be here.  I'm so incredibly lucky and thankful.

Everybody have a good day.  Have a whole lot of good days.