thank you notes 1/12
i'm thankful for the story "i'm pretty comfortable, but i could be a little more comfortable" by lydia davis, which you can hear me read to you by clicking here. i'm thankful for the precision and humor with which it highlights how our perceptions of mildly uncomfortable or inconvenient situations can be distorted and amplified to giant size by our moods. i'm thankful, though, that at the same it also pays respect to how, in the moment, these things can feel so frustrating. i'm thankful for the collection the story is from, can't and won't, which is a book that you should read if you haven't because if you are anything like me, it will bring you so many wonderful feelings (amazon, powell's).i'm thankful to remember right after the book came out when d and i were [redacted] and we kept reading aloud to each other the story called "the woman next to me on the airplane," which i will reproduce here in full:
"the woman next to me on the airplane
the woman next to me has many fast and easy crossword puzzles to do during the flight, from a book called 'fast and easy crosswords'. i have only slow and difficult crosswords, or impossible crosswords. she finishes each puzzle and turns the page, as we fly at top speed through the air. i stare at one page and don't finish any."
i'm thankful for "slow and difficult crosswords, or impossible crosswords," which we could not stop laughing hysterically about. i'm thankful for the addition of the clause "as we fly at top speed through the air," for how that underlines the narrator's frustration and puts it in perspective by defamiliarizing the wonder of air travel. i'm thankful that lydia davis's narrative persona offers a gentler, more empathetic version of the bernhardian grumpiness which is my favorite kind of humor in literary writing (i'm thankful for geoff dyer). i'm thankful that though my mfa program ruined short stories for me and i mostly cannot read them anymore without seeing them as pieces of broken machinery and hearing a ghost chorus of assholes (me being one of them) chattering in workshop, i was still able to read and love this collection. i'm thankful for the collected stories of lydia davis (amazon, powell's), which i bought after a very bad time at a good bookstore on lincoln road in miami with my mom years ago and which helped me understand for the first time how short things can be important. i'm thankful for its size and for the soothing peach-ish color of the cover.
i'm thankful for the story that the accountant at work told me this morning about her husband's car trouble in our cold weather: how last night his car wouldn't start in a grocery store parking lot and so she had to pick him up and take him and his friend to the bowling alley and then bring them both home; how this morning he was going to take their backup car, a pathfinder, since he didn't have his car; how a minute after he went out to their driveway to leave, he came back inside holding the door handle in his hand because it had snapped off when he tried to use it; how the hatchback and the other doors were frozen shut, except the rear driver's side door, so in the end, he, a man over six feet tall in snow gear and heavy boots, had to climb through and up and around to get into the driver's seat. i'm thankful for the way that her love for him shone through her smile as she gleefully recounted his misfortune.
i'm thankful that yesterday afternoon, when she told me she was going home to search for a very important flash drive that she was afraid she might have lost, i bowed my head and closed my eyes and did prayer hands and she laughed and i laughed. i'm thankful she emailed me later in the afternoon to tell me that my prayer had worked and she'd found it. i'm thankful that even if a prayer is kind of a joke, it might still work.
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