Friday Five: Thankfulness List

From Mary Beth at RevGalBlogPals:

Welcome to the Friday Five!

This one is going to be veeeery simple: List at least five things (people, places, graces, miracles...) for which you are thankful. You may elaborate as you wish, or keep it simple.

I'm an extrovert, so the first hundred or so entries on my list are people: My partner, Garden Girl; my children, Nashy, Witter, Shiny and Nature Boy; my sisters, Supermom and Annie-boo and their husbands and my sweet nieces and nephews; Garden Girl's brothers and their wives and all the other sweet nieces and nephews; Garden Girl's mom and her dad, whom I miss so much; my own mother and father who both died before their time; my ex-husband; my friend Songbird and the online community she introduced me to; my book club; my church community; my colleagues; my neighbors here on Crunchy Gravel Lane; and the many friends who support me every day with their smarts and humor and courage.

I'm also thankful for my heroes, some of whom I know and some I've never met: Viktor Frankl; Mr. Rogers; Bill & Marcie, who run our local homeless ministry; my oncologist; Maria Montessori; Clara Barton; Job; Jonah; Julia Child; David Schelat; Louis Armstrong; and whoever invented refrigeration.

I'm thankful for life's pleasures: stained glass windows; any beverage that bubbles -- champagne, beer, ginger ale, Diet Coke, or San Pellegrino; sailboats; birdbaths; kissing; iPods; hymns (but not hymns on iPods -- hymns do not survive the recording process); arugula; any place where beauty is collected in one space for everyone to enjoy -- museums, cathedrals, opera houses, theatres, bookstores, fine restaurants, botanical gardens, and Paris.

I'm thankful for life's guilty pleasures: People magazine; Oprah; TiVO; Jon Stewart (not really a guilty pleasure except that I can only watch him on TiVO); peanut butter; lipstick; Retin-A; the entire self-help genre; bubbly beverages (see above); and text-messaging.

I'm thankful for food, which gets its own category (and probably explains why I need to lose weight): bagels; cheese -- the older and stinkier the better; blueberry cobbler; perfectly set scrambled eggs; chocolate chess pie; anything with sweet potatoes; curried vegetables; roasted carrots; Zweiback toast; anything wrapped in puff pastry; strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, blackberries; whipped cream; steamed crabs with Old Bay seasoning; Weetabix; lentil salad; clementines; tapenade; and the almond macaroons from the grand hotel in our town.

On my best days, I'm thankful for all of it-- good, bad or indifferent. We're all so fragile and so precious that it seems insane not to be thankful for whatever is in the world with us, but on my worst days, my own problems, large and small, are like a stone in my shoe that keeps me from feeling any pleasure life offers, and I gripe and feel sorry for myself. Fortunately, those moods can usually be cured by one thing or another on the list above.