thank you notes 11/4
i'm thankful it's friday. i'm thankful for the feeling of friday, the anticipation and the loosening of the belt of the week. i'm thankful to remember when i was a kid and my brother and i would stay over at my grandparents' house on friday nights so that my parents could have a night off. i'm thankful to remember eating salad in wooden bowls with a homemade vinaigrette, which is the first salad i remember loving. i'm thankful also for the proustian memory of the peach ice cream he would make in the summer, which i think is the best fruit ice cream i will ever have.
i'm thankful when it wasn't summer, there was still always dessert on friday nights. i'm thankful to remember breyer's vanilla ice cream drenched in hershey's chocolate syrup. i'm thankful to remember my grandmother's rum cake, which was her signature dessert and am thankful to slightly regret how in later years, i showed a preference for the frozen sara lee cherry or strawberry cheesecakes that she would sometimes buy for her bridge club, how i would state a preference for those over the rum cake, which in retrospect i think hurt her feelings a bit. i'm thankful to know that though i can have a sara lee cheesecake anytime, i'll never have a rum cake made by her again.
i'm thankful to remember sitting in the front room of my grandparents' house looking out the big picture window at the driveway and the front yard and the street, waiting for my cousins, who would sometimes come down from winston salem. i'm thankful that i had a habit of doing this, because i was just so excited for them to come so we could play that i couldn't think about anything else. i'm thankful that my dad had a habit of coming in from another room and saying "a watched pot never boils." i'm thankful that he wasn't mean about it and that it was just a funny little routine between us, which sometimes i found funny and sometimes (if i was really bored), i found frustrating.
i'm thankful, though, that one afternoon, just after he had come in and said this, my cousins' minivan pulled into the driveway and i shrieked and leapt up and down, happy to have proven his saying wrong. i'm thankful for how happy i was for him to have been wrong and for me to be right. i'm thankful for this defining moment, maybe my first stirring of adulthood. i'm thankful that it didn't matter to me that that kind of coincidence never happened again, that it happening that one time was enough to sustain me for the rest of my childhood.
i'm thankful to remember fridays in college, for the things i can remember that weren't blotted out by alcohol. i'm thankful that i always had a friday ritual that involved doing at least one load of laundry (partially because i liked having clean clothes and partially since i wanted to have the full range of clothes to choose from for my friday night outfit) and cleaning my room (partially because i liked having a clean room and partially in case of the small chance that someone might want to come home with me). i'm thankful to remember the little lull of a few hours between dinner and when we would start heavily pre-drinking and going out. i'm thankful to have recently recovered the earliest recording i have of myself playing a song, which i remember doing during one of these quiet times.
i'm thankful for the hope encoded in a friday, the potential energy stored there, just waiting to be released. i'm thankful that work has continued to suck but the people i work with have continued to do the opposite of sucking, which i am very thankful for. i'm thankful for this funny post about scorpios (thankful to be a scorpio) and for this post about fucking a bar of soap. i'm thankful for the strange calm peace of this animation of everyday failures. i'm thankful for nina simone's recording of "i shall be released."
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