thank you notes 9/17

i'm thankful that i used to devote large amounts of energy to hiding and scaring d, which i saw as an expression of affection (i'm making the effort to stop what i was doing and stand wedged behind this door for ten minutes because i love you) but am thankful to have come to understand that she did not actually like this most if not all of the time and so it was not actually a loving gesture. i'm thankful that the additional space we have in the house we're renting now vs. the apartment we used to live in provides many more opportunities for me to scare her and thankful that, to avoid doing so, since i no longer want to do so intentionally, i have developed a policy of saying, in a loud, firm, but not scary voice, "approaching!" to hopefully alert her to my presence without actually scaring her. i'm thankful that sometimes i still scare her because i say this too late and thankful that i have offered to wear bells (like the collars some cats and dogs have), an offer she has not yet taken me up on but which i leave open for the future.

i'm thankful that after my run yesterday, i stopped at the grocery store because we were out of fruit. i'm thankful for the bright coolness of the produce section of the grocery store, for the sprayers that mist the delicate vegetables. i'm thankful for the poem "a supermarket in california," which i often think of in the grocery store. i'm thankful that all of the bananas were pretty green, which is better than the alternative, and am thankful that plums were still on sale. i'm thankful that when i got to the self checkout queue, all of the machines were taken except for one, which was displaying an error message. i'm thankful that i stood back, perfectly content to wait until a working machine opened up, when a cashier appeared and beckoned me over to the error machine and asked, "will you be my guinea pig and i'll give you one of your items free?" i'm thankful to have of course said yes and thankful that she then went to the trouble, before checking them in, of trying to guess which one of the items (the plums or bananas) would be more expensive so that she could make that item the free one. i'm thankful to have watched her navigate the secret menus of the console and used a button titled "make it right" to make the plums not cost anything. i'm thankful to have thanked her effusively.

i'm thankful that before work yesterday, i took a benadryl. i'm thankful that even though work was still very busy, i felt somewhat better about it yesterday, either because the benadryl was mildly sedating and/or because i have some kind of allergy to something here this time of year that inflames my nerves (a doctor once suggested to me several years ago, when, on labor day weekend, d had to take me to urgent care two days in a row because i was having endless bad panic attacks and thought i was dying and i revealed that the last time i had had such bad attacks was the previous september). i'm thankful for benadryl, which in its generic form is sold in large quantities for a small amount of money at the grocery store and which d uses as a sleep aid (and which i used to use as a sleep aid, before going on a stronger prescription). i'm thankful for the little pink pills, which we call "bennies." i'm thankful for "benny and the jets."