Out of My Mind

Every year, when Thanksgiving rolls around, my mind – and my column – turn to thoughts of what to be thankful for.
I also think a lot about what I’m going to serve for Thanksgiving dinner because I want to try that new recipe for wild rice-stuffed acorn squash, but cling to the string bean casserole which was invented in 1955 by a woman named Dorcas Reilly at the Campbell Soup Company (the original recipe card of her green bean casserole recipe is now at the National Inventor's Hall of Fame where it can be found among Enrico Fermi's invention of the first controlled nuclear reactor and Thomas Alva Edison's light bulb and phonograph; there’s probably an orange Jello® carrot mold recipe there too).
One morning last week, I was flipping through my recipe books while enjoying a cup of coffee at the kitchen table when I spied, through the window, a small tree in our yard shaking unnaturally.
Of course, the force of nature was my husband.
He was stringing lights in a new tree. And these weren’t just any lights – they are solar-powered. I chuckled to myself that I had better find something to do, before he saw me just sitting, and had me running on the treadmill to power the dishwasher.
There is a potent Jewish concept defined by acts of kindness performed to perfect or repair the world called, in Hebrew, tikkun olam, and in my husband’s efforts to embody this ideal, he has embraced the potential of sustainability and the three R’s: reduce, reuse, recycle. We drive a hybrid, we fill our recycling bin each week, we’ve taken out our grass and replaced it with less-water-consuming vegetable gardens and succulent patches, we buy used furniture and we walk almost everywhere we can.
Sometimes I chuckle to myself as he “modernizes” our lives. If he had been born a generation earlier, I think he would have been an avid fan of the Clapper – the sound-activated on/off switch. As it is now, our rechargeable doorbell takes pictures and can be answered by smartphone anywhere in the world, and our yard has solar-powered, movement-sensitive lighting that provides a safe path to the garbage can at night.
But I am thankful for his efforts – he is trying to make the world a better place, and that’s an important thing to be grateful for. In fact, I am thankful for everything he does, big and small:
– going down to the basement when there are scurrying, scratchy noises down there, finding great new restaurants (usually in the diviest of places, with a B rating, but delicious none-the-less), driving for miles to see a roadside attraction (or a promising cheese shop, which most recently, turned out to be a mini-fridge in the back of a barn – leave your $5 in a cup, and take your Vermont Brie), shopping for junktiques, enduring the same questions over and over (thanks to my short-term memory problems), and tolerating my death-grip on his arm during take-offs and landings.
And this Thanksgiving, I’ll be thankful for the twinkling lights on our patio – his way of generating some much-needed light and enchantment as we enter this wonderful holiday season. Happy Turkey Day!