Thanksgiving

Thanks be to God for this day off. For staying in bed until nine with my warm soft cat while cones dropped from the trees onto the roof, loudly, thumped and rolled, making a sort of Morse code I didn’t get. The ground was thick with frost first thing today, though I didn’t need to look out the window to know, for even before I opened my eyes I felt the wintry cold on my face, as only the thinnest and half-assedly insulated defence stands between me and the cold—but such wonders lie outside of these windows, cold stars and cold moonlight, that it would never occur to me to unroll the bamboo shades that have been rolled up tight the whole time I’ve lived here, even though this would make the place a darn sight warmer. I don’t care. I’ve warm blankets and a warm and cuddly cat.

Thanks be to God for Thomas Merton, who I was reading again this morning—I am forever reading Merton—may his soul rest, dead nearly forty years now, maybe he’s calmed down a bit. Occurs to me I could be entirely satisfied with a writing career consisting solely of copying down favourite passages of his—just this morning: "For my part, my name is that sky, those fenceposts, and those cedar trees"; "The silly, hopeless passion to give myself away to any beauty eats out my heart"; "This is the secret of the psalms. Our identity is hidden in them."* But, to paraphrase the rabbinical story, on the last day when God calls me forth to tally up my accounts, He won’t ask, "Why weren’t you Merton?" He’ll ask, "Why weren’t you Fanny?" I shall labour here below to make certain he need not ask that question. Or, at least, to be sure I have a damn good answer.

Thanks be to God for books, in general. "Admire the world for never ending on you." (Who said that? My mind is a vast lost & found of quotes, unattached to any owner, like drawers full of sunglasses and kids’ plastic coin purses with nothing but bingo chips in them. Who will claim them?) Whenever someone inhales sharply in horror upon hearing that I’ve never read such-and-such an author (take your pick: Faulkner, Dickens, Proust, PD James) I shrug calmly and say that if I’d already read everything out there worth reading, then they might as well shoot me now. I take great comfort in the fact that the world of good books will never end on me (this is indeed a miracle of God, considering the amount of crap that pullulates out there—and I’m an authority on crap. Remember, I work in a public library.) In the last few days I have fallen deeply and hopelessly in love with two authors I didn’t even know existed as recently as two weeks ago. The first wrote a novel so exquisite, so smart and funny (and I mean the laugh-out-loud-and–snort kind of funny,) so utterly delicious that I want both to forgo eating and sleeping and do nothing but read it, and to read not another word of it because if I do one thing will surely lead to another and then I will be finished reading it and never will I get to read it for the first time again, ever. Remember those packets of candy you got as a kid, that popped and rocked and fizzed and exploded in your mouth? That’s what this writing is like. But I will not provide the title of the book nor the author here (have I learned nothing in retail?) because some of you faithful should receive the book for Christmas and I don’t want to wreck the surprise, and I don’t want you to go and buy it yourself. You may ask me personally, and I may or may not tell, accordingly (maybe you’re getting socks or an orange from me this holiday season.)

The other love of my life at the moment is Andrew Hudgins who, for me—along with Jane Kenyon for the chick side of things—defines what Christian poetry should be like in these last days. And so you’ll forgive me for previously gushing about a book and withholding any information that may lead you to identify it (okay, I’ll say one thing: it talks about baseball) here is a link to a poem that if you read it now will make your whole day—never mind, your whole week worthwhile, no matter how badly you’ve screwed it up, no matter how much you planned to get done and haven’t and now have not a hope and hell of doing, it being Friday afternoon and all.
(And thanks be to the donor of literary lifeblood who suggested these books. May I be so worthy as to one day repay you.)

*Excerpted from "Day Unto Day," an chunk of The Sign of Jonas found in A Thomas Merton Reader.