A Glass More Than Half Full of Reasons for Thanks

When I was a kid, Thanksgiving seemed like a precursor to a Hallmark holiday, fake, contrived by traditionalists for tradition’s sake: Be thankful because. Now eat your turkey or you’ll get no pie.

I never said much about the meaning of Thanksgiving back then because it didn’t seem relevant to my life. Not like the Chatty Cathy doll I wanted for Christmas or the fact that my mother always cut my hair short even though I just knew I had the potential for gorgeous Barbie doll locks.

We did do the Pilgrim and Indian drill at school, which was kind of fun, and to this day, I retain an inordinate amount of Thanksgiving minutiae in my brain.

(A few years ago on a slow Thanksgiving news day, I stopped people on the street asking them if they knew how the holiday got started. Only one, a teen-ager home from college, had a clue.)

But in general, Thanksgiving stood out as just another grown-up oddity in my childhood, like that peculiar habit parents had of gathering in each other’s houses for what they called parties when all they ever did was talk for hours without benefit of toys.

Thanksgiving, too, was a little strange, but not particularly offensive. And my grandmother’s mashed potatoes were especially good.

Yet when you’re the one expected to provide the turkey and trimmings, your perspective changes.

You ruminate. You look back, and ahead. You knock on wood. You dress up the children, take their picture. You forget the rolls in the oven. You put more meaning in your prayers.

Or I do, at least. Then I think of that parable about the water in the glass. Is it half empty or is it half full?

I will cast my lot with the latter. Because, regardless of the everyday aggravations, writing this column has enriched my life.

I’ve often wanted to publicly thank the many people who have taken me in, a stranger with a notebook and a pen, and talked to me like a friend. They’ve trusted me, and, really, it’s hard to imagine a greater gift.

Their names form a very long list. One is Gracie, a dwarf who drives a pink hearse, otherwise known as Pinkie the elf at Christmas time. She tickled me with her wisecracks and touched me with her tears.

Thanh Nguyen, the child of the Vietnam War who says he’ll never give up hope of finding his American father, wrote to thank me for passing along the names of men who understood what it must be like growing up between cultures without your dad. They wanted to help him with their money and their time.

“I hope my dream will come true in someday,” Thanh writes. “Any way I am very glad and thank you very much to your helps.”

Sometimes, I’ve asked people to talk to me from the depths of their personal agony--after their child has been killed, as they watch their baby dying, shortly after the diagnosis of an incurable disease. They have, and I’ve been humbled by their strength.

Marci and Bob Stiglitz, of Huntington Beach, come to mind. They adopted their son, Timmy, at birth and then the child’s natural mother changed her mind. Wrenching court battles followed, and the Stiglitzes’ legal fees forced them to take a second mortgage on their home.

A Superior Court judge ruled in the Stiglitzes’ favor, but the appellate court made that decision null and void. “The court may not consider whether returning the child to the birth mother will be in the minor’s best interests,” the 4th District Court of Appeal declared in one of the more chilling examples of dispassionate legalese.

So Timmy was returned to his teen-age mother, at the age of 15 months, and removed from her custody soon after that. The prosecutor in the felony child abuse case that followed told me about the horrifying photographs that seemed to be spitting out thousands of ugly words.

But not long ago, Marci Stiglitz dropped me a little note. They have a new member of their family now. Her name is Breonne, and she was adopted at birth, in Kansas, where the adoption laws make more sense.

The Stiglitzes say they are planning on having a wonderful Thanksgiving this year. They’ve been blessed. And, yes, Timmy will always be in their hearts. They love him very much.

I, too, am counting on quite a feast, even though I’ll be cooking it myself. I’ll be with my daughters and husband, not to mention our two cats.

Oh, and about Goldie, the family goldfish that I wrote about not long ago. She has passed on, of natural causes I might add. Really. I promise. The water in her scummy little bowl was always more than half full.