Thankful for the small things

A lone pelican works our cove, swooping with his huge beak pointed downward, keen eyes following fingerlings below the surface of the water.

He spots a fat one and forming a dagger with his body, he plunges, then bobs to the surface, tilts his enormous beak upward and lets his holiday hors d’oeurvre slip down his throat.

Then, extending his neck, he spreads his wings wide, flaps once, twice, and rises again into the hazy sunshine.  Magnificent.  Serene.  Emblematic of the beauty of nature and the cycle of life.

Across the alley, my neighbor’s boys jump on their trampoline, rising above the fence line in counterpoint, their longish hair rising too, outward, and their arms for balance.  Their young voices call out into the crisp air. 

Leaves on the gingko tree in their yard fan out yellow now.  And behind it, what is that tree?  Scarlet!  Dazzling.

My cat hops onto my lap as I write, turns and curls into her coziest configuration, pushing her nose and lips against my hand as she goes.  Her predecessor lived to 21 years so I’m hoping she will accompany me into my old age.  We are of like minds, after all.

I hear our boomerang son in his room below me, cajoling his online international team members in World of Warcraft.  He’ll be with us another year or so as he reestablishes himself on solid ground this time.  He’s smart and strong and good.  Just like we hoped and planned for, if a little tardy.

Mr. Plath and I have been married almost 25 years now and we have that easy comfort of a pair of old shoes. 

2015, our Silver Anniversary year is shaping up to be a memorable one:  He’s retiring come February and already dancing the happy dance of a short-timer.  A party is definitely in the offing. 

We’re planning a nostalgic repeat of our honeymoon trip to Niagara Falls coupled this time with a visit to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.  While we’re in the neighborhood, we might head over to Fenway Park to see Pablo Sandoval play.

There’s even talk of a third pilgrimage to Alaska this year to catch some halibut for the freezer – you really only need one!  Maybe we’ll go to Kodiak Island this time.  See glaciers and bald eagles.  And a moose.  Or a grizzly.  Through the binoculars!

That book I vowed to complete in 2014 is close to its checkered flag.  One last push and I’ll move it to the next phase, still muddling along, learning as I go.

On Facebook, past students send out their Thanksgiving wishes.  Some are married with babies and toddlers and I feel like a virtual grand-mamma.  The least taxing role of all, but still heartwarming.  Maybe before too long the Boomerang Kid will produce some progeny and we will be real-time actual grandparents! 

Oklahoma friends and family send smiling pictures and “wish you were here!”  Out of focus or too far from the lens – it’s OK.  The message still hits the mark.

I have it easy for Thanksgiving dinner again this year.  The Plath family gathers in Sacramento.  Siblings, spouses and the next generation, and the next, arrive bearing side dishes.  Cheesy broccoli and rice casserole.  Candied yams.  My sister-in-law is the only person I’ve ever met who doesn’t want leftovers.  She always sends lots of turkey home with us.  Yum!

My beloved 94-year-old father-in-law will make the trek and hold court at the dinner table.  Seeing him gaze into the eyes of his great-granddaughter is mystical and life-affirming.

These next few weeks leading up to Christmas and the New Year are some of my favorites – joyful and sentimental.  I’ll decorate the house this weekend and have as many mini-parties as I can to share it and show it off and celebrate.

Oh!  A pair of swans glides across the cove now!  And Pachelbel on the radio!  My mother would love this!  She raised me on classical music and Audubon.  Thanks Mom. 

So there it is – my thanks-giving. 

I could go on, but you get the gist.  Life is so good.  Bittersweet and sweet.  Better than I ever imagined it could be.   


Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours.

Good, for goodness sake!

He sees you when you’re sleeping!?

Well that’s just great.

Set aside for the moment the inherent creepiness of that idea – Billy Bob Thornton in a red velvet suit window peeping on a middle-aged woman. 

Hey!  I could be middle-aged!  What with modern science and life expectancies extended every year, 126 isn’t so unrealistic, is it?

Set it aside.  Santa’s not the National Security Administration after all.  Or, maybe he is more like the NSA that we want to believe.  The NSA’s benign, right?  Only checking in to see if we have been bad.  Totally disinterested if we have been good.  Right. 

Yep, that’s it.  The NSA is just keeping us on our Goody Two Shoes’ toes.  Like Santa.

So, if Santa sees a middle-aged woman sleeping with her mouth open, just as an example, she wouldn’t get demerits for that, would she?

Santa would still remember her modest Christmas wishes.  He would not be so grossed out that he crossed her off his list, would he?  Would he??

And why is it that only little kids sleep with their mouths closed, anyway?  They already have a leg up at the Bureau of the Cute and Adorable.  It is only in the autumn of one’s years that one’s chin relaxes, sags and ultimately lets go, only perfunctorily guarding one’s uvula.  We are the ones who need special consideration!

But surely Santa overlooks mouth breathing.  Surely.  He still knows she’s a good girl.  A dry tongue wouldn’t put him off, would it?  Everyone loves a parakeet!

And this whole thing with drool – again, endearing in the little ones, but for the rest of us, a sad soggy scenario, not appealing to Santa I fear.

And how does that phenomenon play itself out anyway?  Does a person just drool herself all the way to a dry mouth?  It is out of her control, you know.  She’s being judged while she SLEEPS! 

And still watching when I’m awake?  Relentless!  And utterly unfair.  How can a person bear up under this kind of scrutiny?

OK, I am mostly nice.  That counts for something, doesn’t it? 

I mean honestly, who doesn’t take the cream cheese frosting out of another lady’s shopping cart on occasion?  That’s not truly naughty!  I spent MINUTES scanning the shelves for it to no avail.

Geez!  Where’s the harm?  She found it the first time; she’ll find it again!  Come on Santa!  Cut a girl a break!

And the way I see it, I contributed to the greater good when I sat through a second green light after that mean man behind me honked so rudely and said unkind things when I absentmindedly sat through the first green light.  I’m sure he came away feeling philosophical.  I helped him understand that rushing through life robs it of its joy.  He must surely have paid it forward!

See?  Santa??

I am wondering what your perspective is on things like this.  I mean, what is your method of calculation on the good-bad spectrum?  Are there baskets or goalposts, points of any kind?  It is not so clear cut!  Shades of gray, Santa!  You have to inject some subjectivity!

I think those spontaneous acts of charity in traffic count for more than the fake ones everyone else points to this time of year.  So what if you are tripping around doing “random acts of kindness”?  Whoopti-frickin’-do! 

Let’s just cut to the chase on this thing:  You have the goodies and I want ‘em. 

I have made a good faith effort not to W. C. Fields it all over town.  That is to say I kept most of my cantankerousness to myself.  Anything you heard to the contrary was an unintentional burst of irritability brought on by all those perfect little people who are so annoying to the rest of us.  Don’t believe everything you hear Santa.  Everyone has an agenda.


So let loose with the largesse Santa Baby, or I alert the NSA to your brand of terrorism – nighttime peeping and list-keeping and playing of favorites!  I haven’t lived this many years to be cut out of the booty!


That’s right.  Two can play at this game.  When I’m good, I’m very good.  But when I’m bad…make a note of it.

A Christmas Love Story

We women have ruined men where Christmas shopping goes.  We’ve taken shopping out of their hands; and we’ll even argue in defense of our mistake, saying they just mess it up anyway.  Which is true, after all. 

But I have a suspicion that men may have tricked us into this arrangement.  It may be just like my brother’s inability to vacuum adequately.  When we were kids and Mom asked him to plug in the Kirby, he always did; but when he finished the stripes were too far apart.  The carpet looked like a lawn mowed by Mr. Magoo.   

Next time, Mom would come around to me on the sly asking if I’d run the vacuum.  Glenn just couldn’t do a very good job, she’d say. 

I actually took some pride and self-righteous satisfaction in my vacuuming until I caught Glenn smirking like Tom Sawyer when he complimented me on my skill with the upright. 

In like manner, we women take the full Christmas list of family, friends, neighbors, and acquaintances whom we feel compelled to buy for.  We stew and strategize.  We plan an efficient route of travels between local merchants and malls.  We make forays to and from the car while employing all the recommended security advisories – keys between fingers, head on a swivel, walking briskly, checking the backseat before we get in.  We wrap and ribbon, and sometimes wrap again to mail on schedule for a timely arrival of the gifts to HIS family back east. 

Yes, oh yes.  We’re good.  W. O. M. A. N.  Sing it again.  The men just couldn’t handle it. 

They shop only for us.  God love ‘em. 

My husband and I have an excellent system that takes all the thinking, er, guesswork out of the equation for him.  It would be an awful lot for him, or any husband, to pay careful attention to things his wife admires and comments on in the course of the year, making a mental note, taking private pleasure in planning a surprise for her of something he knows she’ll love.  

Nope.  We put that fairytale to rest about the fourth year of our marriage.  That was the year I was just finishing up with the homemade peanut butter cups on Christmas Eve when he jerked and jumped out of his recliner like a reanimated C3PO.  “Oh my!  We’re approaching the deadline for shopping R2!” he seemed to say in that adorable, befuddled manner.  “We’d best get going!”  

Out the door he went, rubbing his head and patting his pockets.  “I’m going to the hardware store, Honey,” he said, certain he’d duped me completely.   

He was gone a long, long time, came in after dark, apparently empty-handed.  But next morning, parked beside the tree with a bow taped to its handle, was my Hoky.  My very own Hoky.  It’s like a rotary-blade manual-push lawn mower, but for hardwood floors and carpet!  He surprised me after all. 

The following year we devised the system.  Actually, I devised it.  As the season approaches, I scan the catalogs that arrive in the mail.  I circle items I love, but would not buy for myself – this sweater, that pinky ring, these plush boots, that chunky necklace.  I tear out the pages and save them until Black Friday, when I give him the sheaf of papers and say something coy like, “Honey, any one of these things would make such a lovely Christmas gift.” 

I believe I see relief in his eyes, and gratitude, as he accepts the pages like Moses receiving the tablets.  He turns away, shoulders hunched, as though to hide them from my prying eyes.  We never speak of the exchange again. 

I always give him lots to choose from, so I never know what he might select.  But he can’t go wrong.  That’s the beauty of it.  It’s a sure-fire surprise, and a guaranteed happy ending to his stressful holiday season.   

He almost always buys a couple of items from the lineup.  And he’s even taken to doing his own wrapping, usually on Christmas morning.  He’s careful not to square the corners too well, and the tape often gets bunched up and crumply.  It’s his trademark.  Wouldn’t want to get too good at it.   

Am I enabling him?  Yeah, probably.  He could do it on his own if I put my foot down and tapped my toe.  But what’s the fun in that?  

We have a win-win in the real world.  It's even romantic in its own way.  We should all be so lucky. 

Merry Christmas.

Cyber Christmas

So I bought a web cam. Or is it webcam? Spell check accepts both. It’s kind of a “to me, from me” Christmas gift. I went ahead and opened it and everything.

I had a Blackberry once and ultimately had to admit to myself that I had no business with a Blackberry. I was working then and believed the calendar feature would be so great. Never again, so I thought, would I go to the wrong place for a meeting, or show up at the right place on the wrong day.

Turns out those tiny, shiny, infuriating nubs on the Blackberry’s keyboard are all buttons with multiple functions. So an “A” isn’t only an “A” but also a “~” and a “%” depending on if you are using caps or not, which is of course another function on another nub. I found I most wanted to use those nubs to create a line of cursing:!%~@##^&*!! But even that took too much concentration and the pinpoint mechanical fingers of a futuristic droid, which I most certainly am not.

I never used the calendar. Not once. I got email on the thing and it just felt like I was being pestered and pursued. And I paid that exorbitant rate for the mandatory two years! Why, I could have had lots of new shoes for the money I wasted on that glitzy gadget.

Which brings me back to the webcam: I bought it because a friend of mine went to Zurich for Christmas to visit a mutual friend of ours who now lives there. We three agreed how much fun it would be to go to the next level of chat while they were there and I was here. We wouldn’t just IM on FB, we’d SEE each other while we talked! Doesn’t that sound GREAT?!

In honesty, the webcam connected without snafu. Loading the software – no problem-o. It’s what comes next that is so disconcerting. The thing offered to take my picture for the profile it would post in contact books around the world. Okay.

Now, I’m with the crowd that wears “readers” – those half glasses you can get at Target after you guess what your prescription would be if you went to the eye doctor and got real glasses. I use them when I’m on the computer. I’m wearing them now and feel perfectly happy. But this thing took my picture as I leaned in and tilted my head back to get the proper angle so I could see the shutter button on the screen.

You know what I’m talking about. It’s the standard, old, funky-person pose. When your head tilts back, your jaw juts forward, and your mouth must open. If in vanity, you picked the weaker power on your readers, you still have to squint, which, as a final insult, exposes your front teeth. That’s the pose. My new webcam took a picture of me peering at it as though it were something gooey stuck on the mirror. Here, I’ll just get that with a tissue.

So that seems unfair at the very least. Here I am in the 21st Century and my own stuff is making fun of me. I think I deserve better.

To cap it all off, the three of us have yet to overcome the time difference between Zurich and Benicia, so no one has called anyone on the webcam phone. We’ve just been sending emails back and forth. So turn-of-the-century!

As I review this debacle, it seems pretty clear; they should be out enjoying Zurich anyway. Why call me up and prattle on about how cool it is to be there. I know that already!

I guess if we were love-struck and separated by fate, a webcam could provide us the screen to place our fingers on, ever so tenderly, as though actually touching, instead of virtually.

As it is, my new toy mocks me in cruelest techno-cyber sort of way. Like HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey, it never blinks, but waits for me to squint again. I know I can unplug it, dismantle its cyber-mind. But that seems like surrender. Defeated by a Blackberry, I will not concede victory to Skype!

Merry Christmas to Zurich! And to all a good night!