8th Day of Thanksgiving

(Okay, so I guess I've decided to stick to that format, at least for the moment.)

Today I'm grateful for the peaceful, safe community in which I live. Southlake is a small town (27,706 people) in a very large Metroplex (6.6 million people). When I first moved here, I often remarked that it had all the inconveniences of a small town plus all the inconveniences of a big city, all rolled into one. Now I'd have to say the reverse.

The DFW Metroplex is a big city, with a lot of big city advantages (for example and of particular interest to me, teams in all big league sports). Yet Southlake is pretty much a small town, and has some of the nicest facets of small town life: people care about the community. The economy is stable. Crime pretty much stays under control. We citizens have relatively a lot to say about what life will be like in our little corner of the world. And quality of life is a genuine consideration in making decisions about the town's future.

Mostly, though, I pretty much don't have to worry about stray bullets. That's a lot.

So I'm grateful for the circumstances—one of which is that I've been just plain lucky—that led me to live here instead of many other places in the world.

The view from our carport. Yes, I'm lucky!

I'm glad I know her

It's the 7th Day of Thanksgiving, and my mother-in-law's birthday!

I'm thankful that I've had the chance to know her. We didn't start out all that smoothly. Rich was recently divorced when we met, and his whole family thought he was re-marrying too soon. (We're married 27 years now. Ha, and nyeh!) I have to say Dorothy and I had a guarded relationship for many years, but a few years ago we finally kind of became friends. And I value her, and her experience and unique perspective, so much!

She was born Dorothy Kiolbasa, to a family who had come to the U.S. from Poland and Bohemia (which was an actual country then, and not just a lifestyle). Born and raised in Chicago, she met and married Joe Osman, and the two of them moved into his parents' basement apartment. Her own mother-in-law welcomed her with open arms, and the young couple lived there until they bought their first house. (And, BTW, I'm sorry I never got to meet Grandma Osman. She sounds like a woman I would have enjoyed knowing! I'll tell you a few stories about her sometime.)

Dorothy worked for IBM in Chicago doing and training others in key punch, and did pretty much the same thing at Brachs Candy Company. She raised two boys with a husband who was a traveling salesman (no, really!). She and Joe scrimped and saved for years, planning to and eventually buying their own business. She recalls Saturday nights from that time when they'd be sitting on the front porch watching people drive by, on their way to a night out, when she and Joe weren't even willing to spend the money to go to the movies. That's how serious they were about their future. BTW, those people who were driving by later wondered how the two of them had saved enough to buy their own business. Answer: If you don't spend money, you have more of it for later. (You might want to write that down somewhere.)

Taken at Costco. Dorothy LOVES Costco.

They bought a hardware store in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, when Rich was 16, moving there from Chicago. They worked together to run it, enjoying the store but not small-town life. (They also brought a percolator home from the store, which they still use every day.) They kept the store—which must have been profitable enough, I guess—for a couple of years, then sold it and bought Schlosser Tool & Machinery in Denver. They both worked there until they retired, and enjoy Denver a lot (except for the high-altitude cooking; it takes 45 minutes to boil potatoes, which is really ridiculous if you ask me).

Dorothy has always loved to ski, which might have something to do with how she's felt about Denver. She told me recently, "Skiing down a mountain, the cold wind blowing in my face…that's the best feeling in the world." She's had some health issues that have made Joe concerned enough about falls to resist (like an immovable object) going skiing the last few years. Personally, I'm campaigning for her to ski again, with some appropriate assistance. We have to learn to work around our health difficulties. When I had breast cancer, between my mastectomy and reconstruction, while I was having to stuff one side of my (very large) brassiere, Dorothy suggested my new nickname should be Won Hung Low. (Yes, I did laugh at that, long and loud.) One adjusts but keeps going.

She's always had a gift for knowing things that were going to happen, and the whole family (me included) has always taken her "hunches" very seriously. She once told Joe, as they were leaving for a vacation, that she would be coming back lying down (she sustained a broken pelvis in a car wreck while they were traveling and was transported home by ambulance), and that they wouldn't be using the boat he was working to get ship shape, at least not for the weekend outing they had invited people to (his mother died that night). Because of her, and her uncanny accuracy, I learned to respect my own hunches and gut feelings. If it's nagging at me, bothering me, there's a reason. Pay attention!

They both love to travel, and have been more places than I even have the nerve to hope to see, but it's getting harder now that they're getting older. She's done bunka (a Japanese form of needlework) for decades, and until just recently taught classes in it at the local community center. She's taught me some things in the kitchen (I think about her every time I make grilled sandwiches, and she has a couple of fantastic cranberry salad recipes), and a few things about growing old. I'm glad we get along now, and I look forward to seeing her, though I don't make it up there as often as I'd like.

So today, I'm thankful for the family I married into, and the mother-in-law who—I hope!—got a nearly-daughter out of the deal.

6th Day of Thanksgiving

First of all, Biddy is feeling much better, thank you for asking. Unfortunately, though, the x-rays they took last night show a couple of things that could be very bad news, indeed. They're going to repeat the x-rays tomorrow, so hopefully we'll find out more. (Please, if you would, say another prayer or two for her.)

Okay, then. Today I'm thankful that I'm living in such amazing times! For all the bad things in the world, and the progress-run-amuck, I still think that having antibiotics and cars that can parallel park themselves is, all in all, a very good thing.

Not every discovery is really an advancement, and not every step forward takes us someplace better, necessarily. But we move forward. And the good things, I think, outnumber the bad.*

In any case, I'm glad to be here to see all this happening!


*Like this, for example. I mean, really, who would have ever thought we could come up with this?

And speaking of cats…

Does anybody else have a cat who loves plants? I mean, "loves" as in to eat? Rocky, who started out as about the saddest of all our hard luck cases, can't get enough plant matter. If I don't feed him some kind of greenery fairly regularly, he chews on the house plants. Every now and then, like this morning, I walk into the master bathroom and discover my windowsill African violet and orchid farm looks like it's been ravaged. Rocky…!

Cats are true carnivores, eating only meat, and needing the quantity of protein that comes from eating only meat. (Dogs, on the other hand, are omnivores like us, and can't survive on nothing but meat. They'll get rickets and such.) But I've read that big cats who hunt herbivores (antelopes, zebras, dik-diks, whatever) often eat the contents of their prey's stomach, sort of like having a salad with your meal. (Honestly, that's actually how the article described it.)

I can't swear to that, but I can tell you that at least this one housecat loves his greens. A little while ago, I was separating the not-so-fresh green onions from the perfectly-useable green onions, and Rocky was absolutely incensed that I wouldn't give him any. You can't give cats (or dogs) onions, they're toxic. Finally, though, I had to grab some lettuce and a couple of spinach leaves from the fridge, so he'd calm down. He ate it all.

I realize he's quirky, but how big a freak is this little guy? Anybody?

T-minus 23

…or, the 5th Day of Thanksgiving. (I warned you. I like them both, so I'll use them both!)

Today I'm thankful for a (relatively) good report on Biddy. In fact, I guess that, relatively speaking, it's a great report. Her heart, liver, thyroid and pancreas are all okay. She has renal pyelonephritis, a bad kidney infection, and hopefully that's what's causing her symptoms—and hopefully it won't leave any permanent kidney damage after it's gone.

She's not acting like she's feeling great, but she's not acting
like she's feeling terrible anymore, either. I'll take it!

The good news is that she's acting more like normal, coming out of hiding and wanting to eat and be petted. The bad news is that she doesn't much like being handled and we'll be treating this infection for about six weeks. So sad, Biddula, but you'll get used to it. (I find that most animals, if you treat them kindly overall, will get used to taking regular baths or having to take meds or being confined or facing other things that they might otherwise find disagreeable, once they get used to it. It's not knowing what's going on that they object to. And you can't really blame them. After all, I prefer to know what's going on; don't you?)

Does that really count as something separate from yesterday? Well, just in case, I'll add this: I'm thankful that something inside me changed, somehow, somewhere along the line, and I became a serious animal lover. Having the pets we've had, and loving them the way I have, has added a whole new dimension to my life and to me, as a person. I have to assume this feeling is a pale reflection of what it feels like to have kids. (We were never so fortunate.) The pleasure at seeing them happy, the worry and fear when they're sick or hurt, the satisfaction at taking care of them and providing what they need. It means something, in the overall scheme of things, I think.

So I'm thankful for all my four-legged family members. And their continuing good health!

4th Day of Thanksgiving

I have a feeling I'll be going back and forth between #th Day of and T-Minus. I like them both.

Today I'm thankful for our pets. We've had many cats and dogs since we've been married, and I've loved them all quite unreasonably. Right now we're fortunate enough to have two dogs who are both happy all the time, and three cats. The cats are quirky and have tons of personality and, for the most part, demand attention. (No aloof cats at our house. Ever.)

Biddy, though, is sick. Very sick. We're waiting on results of her bloodwork to see what's going on, and what we can do about it, but she's very sick. Say a prayer for her, okay? (I know some people think that's silly. I won't tell you what I think of those people, and that's really very virtuous of me. Maybe even Christian.)

So all of them, since they're here for me to love with all my heart. And I do. But especially Biddy, right now. Please help me worry about and pray for her!

T-minus 25 days

Yeah, that seems a little more fitting.

Today I'm thankful for the nice, stable family in which I was raised. Parents who loved us and took good care of us. Large, familiar extended family, some of whom were a little crazy, but we're southern, so that's part of the package.* They weren't perfect, but neither was I. We all** knew how to forgive, forget and move on. And we faced everything that came along the same way: together.


*One of my cousins and her then-young husband were watching The Newlywed Game years ago. The question put to the husbands was, "What would you say is the predominant characteristic of your wife's family?" Jerry thought about it for a minute, then said, "I can't decide whether it would be big hips or insanity." Too true, too true….

**Okay, there are one or two of us who have proven fairly spectacular at holding a grudge, but those are isolated character defects. Let's move on.