Thankful For Little Things

     So what am I thankful for this Thanksgiving. Of course, there's always the obvious blessings . . . life, God, family, and health. And I am thankful for all these. But there are smaller things that I'm thankful for as well, mostly thankful for anyway.

    I enjoy my Kanopy streaming service on our television. It's a free and most importantly totally commercial free way to watch full-length movies. OK so the movies aren't always in English and the movies can be a bit strange, like the movie I just watched this past week. Mother was a Korean movie about a middle aged woman living with her adult mentally challenged son. He is charged with murdering a young Korean woman and the man's mother does everything she can to prove his innocence. She finally finds a witness who confirms that it was indeed her son who killed the woman. The mother brutally beats the witness to death with a pipe wrench and in the end, both mother and son end up going free when an even more mentally challenged fellow confesses wrongly to killing the young woman. The movie ends with the mother dancing on a bus with fellow senior citizens. As I said the movie was strange with subtitles but still better than watching a half hour of commercials.

    Something else I'm thankful for is that we recently got caller ID on our landline telephone. So now do we always know who's calling? Absolutely not. The telemarketers almost always mask themselves by putting in a fake phone number and location. So we get calls from Romulus, Livonia, Whitmore Lake, even calls that our caller ID said were coming from the Lost Peninsula and Scotland Neck, NC. But if we ever answer, the voice on the other end drones “Hello” and we know it's this particular telemarketer who wants to sell us an extended warranty on our car. So now we know not to answer those calls. OK, except once the caller was identified as “Therapy staff.” Now that sounded possible given the number of doctors appointments we have that “therapy staff” could be somebody important. I answered and heard the familiar “Hello” coming from that same telemarketer.

    Finally, I've always enjoyed peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Ever since I was a kid a good PB&J was my go-to meal. I was thankful that as I grew up, if I didn't like the dinner my mother prepared, she said I could always have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich instead. These days picking out an unusual jelly is a real treat. I even put some on my Christmas list—thimbleberry, gooseberry, huckleberry, lingonberry and others. While in Shipshewana, home to an Amish community in Indiana, I bought blueberry hibiscus jam. Worst jam ever. It had a terribly bitter aftertaste. It's languishing in my refrigerator as I speak. So I'm thankful for peanut butter and jelly, so long as the jelly isn't blueberry hibiscus.