Giving Thanks for Mercies Tender and Otherwise

Thank goodness for Thanksgiving.

For one day, at least, we have the decency to express some passing gratitude for living gluteus-deep in plenty, instead of carping daily about inconsequentialities in the midst of a surfeit of stuff that would make a pasha blush.

As it is the trivialities that annoy us, it is small things, too, that can uplift us--like my being grateful that I don’t have to go anywhere near an airport this week.

My mother is thankful that family circumstances no longer require her to cook Thanksgiving dinner, and we, who are very familiar with her lifelong dislike for cooking, are grateful not to have to eat it.

My colleague Fred is abjectly thankful for being male; he came over to my desk, big-eyed and horrified, waving a copy of an alternative newspaper bulked up with holiday ads for Frankenstein remakes: fuller breasts, smaller butts, different noses, wider eyes, fatter lips, bigger nipples, flatter bellies, whiter teeth, liposucked thighs, higher cheekbones, rounder chins, and now “younger” vaginas. Cloning would be easier.

And I too can round up a respectable tally of mercies small and large, thankful that:

* This year there were more Hollywood disaster movies than real L.A. disasters.

* Now all I may have to do to rid my life of Bob Dornan is to switch off the radio.

* Some higher power with a sardonic sense of humor saw fit to start a fire aboard a Japanese whaling ship, injuring no one but rendering it unfit for its annual mission of killing 400 Minke whales for “research.”

* If it achieves nothing else, the Whitewater/Fornigate investigation has given cigars a slightly bad name.

* Pioneering black architect Paul Williams isn’t alive to have seen them demolish his creations--once the headquarters of the Pacific Fleet--at the Long Beach Naval Station.

* Another year has passed and still I’ve not been drunk enough to get tattooed.

* Al Gore has finally found a straight man in Gray Davis.

* I have the fat new Tom Wolfe novel to read and I’ve been spared seeing the horror of the movie version of “Bonfire of the Vanities.”

* Reality bites as red fire ants appear across across Southern California--just in time to counter two new animated movies that sappily anthropomorphize insects.

* Even though the Rose Queen and the Doo Dah Queen will never go shopping together, at least the elected charter reform commission and the appointed charter reform commission may together discover a single philosophy of good L.A. city government to present to us voters.

* A tolerably moderate post-holiday case of the flu is always good for a five- or six-pound weight loss.

* I was not born a pilgrim, given that grim seems to sum up their life’s philosophy . . . and I was not born a Native American, given the grimness that the pilgrims and fellow “discoverers” visited upon them.

* Susan McDougal got acquitted in time for Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year.

* “Babe” stopped my sister from ever eating another bite of pork, and we both are hoping the sequel will have the same salutary effect on my brother.

* San Francisco has honored the memory of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, murdered 20 years ago in City Hall, and not left the tragedy to stay in the public’s minds only for the “Twinkie Defense” mounted by their killer.

* The Hollywood Holiday Inn is the first big L.A. hotel in a dozen years to wear the union label.

* Another influx of one-day-wonder celebrities who show up only on Thanksgiving to serve food at homeless shelters downtown will soon go back home to the Westside, and the poor folks can eat in peace and privacy.

* Because the public doesn’t care what the mathematicians say, there remains only one more year of premillennial hype, not two.

* My acquaintance with Monica Lewinsky and Kenneth Starr is confined to the TV channel changer.

* On one brilliant Thanksgiving day, when I was 9 years old, my friend Vicki and her father took me out over the snowy Ohio landscape in their one-horse open sleigh, and the silvery jangle of the harness bells and the hiss of sleigh runners on snow are still more vivid and real to me than anything that happened yesterday.

*

Patt Morrison’s column runs Wednesdays She fills in today for Shawn Hubler, who has the day off. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com.