10 Things I’m Thankful for on This Thanksgiving Day

In politics or tea, it’s the same way to a better day.

It’s 5am and I can’t get back to sleep which has weirdly filled me with immense gratitude for so much to so many that I’m just going to write down what I’m thankful for on this, hopefully not, our last Thanksgiving Day…

1. I’m thankful for everyone who has not lost their sense of humor and knows that laughter is both our greatest healer/protector and our most potent weapon. As the Dalai Lama said, “What I like about laughter is that when people laugh, they can have new thoughts.” And new thoughts can change the world.

2. I am thankful for my favorite color, Honolulu Blue. Just looking at it makes me happy.

3. I am thankful to the person who made me a cup of ginger peach tea this year. It has made me a better person.

4. I am thankful to the incredible and brave filmmakers in Iran. The best film I’ve seen this year is by Mohammad Rasoulof — “The Seed of the Sacred Fig.” He was sentenced to 8 years in prison for it so he fled the country on foot, on a 28-day journey over the mountains with the movie on his laptop, snuck into Germany then France and won a prize in Cannes in May. Don’t miss this film! Whether it’s in Iran or in the USA, women can’t seem to catch a break. In this movie, it can be dangerous to declare women must do what you say.

5. I’m thankful for the limited “wardrobe” I have in my closet — soft comfortable cottons, a warm hoodie, blue jeans, a pair of boomer dad cargo shorts, some black T’s that make me think I live in the West Village, and a pair of running sneakers that I don’t run in but have found by just wearing them I not only burn an extra thousand calories a day, I’m able to write 3 to 4 pages of my new screenplay in less than an hour! Cardio!

6. I am thankful for the Muses in my life. You know who you are. Keep creating, thinking, fighting.

7. I am thankful to all the women in this country who have had to endure being forced into second-class citizenship, who have had to put up with rampant misogyny and now have to gird themselves for what lies ahead with our rapist-in-chief. Men, our silence is violence. The states of Texas and Georgia have passed laws that have literally killed women for the crime of being pregnant. We will never forget you Amber Nicole Thurman, Candi Miller and Porsha Ngumezi. I will speak your names each day, and I will not allow my rage to subside until all women are free to live and to choose — and only then we will be able to say to the three of you: You did not die in vain.

8. I am thankful for the text I got from Maureen C. this week telling me I was on her list of things to be thankful for this year. I remember on your last day of 8th grade you coming up to me and telling me you were going to kick some butt on student council in high school and I believed you because you were fearless then and you have been that way your whole life. We all need to be fearless now.

9. Thank you Yoko, Nanako, the Low family, Raoul Peck, Jeff and Basel and Rod and Al and Eric and the Davids, my daughter and granddaughter, my sisters and Patricia, my nieces, my cousins, and all who came before me in this family — my Parents and my Grandparents, all the way back to my 8th great-grandfather, John Wattles, who, with other Scottish and Irish rebels, were captured by Cromwell and shipped in chains on a “slave ship” to America because the Lord Protector thought it would be hilarious to sell these white trash hooligans as “slaves” to the new colony of Massachusetts Bay. I am thankful to Henry Louis Gates for finding that story and telling it to me. I am thankful to all of you who write me emails with brilliant ideas and loving words. I am thankful to my neighbors, my crew, to Ava, Rashida, Rashida’s sister, Dan, Barbara Lee, Ilhan, and Angie. Thank you to Felipa, Laurie, Bob, Jess, Brenda M, the Farrahs, Mansours, Hamadys, Joubrans and Khalids of Flint, all the smart nuns, all the radical priests, The Irish, the children of the Holocaust survivors down the street, the nine boys from my high school who came back from Vietnam in a box. I promised the last of you that I would never again sing the National Anthem in recognition of what was stolen from you, from us, from the Vietnamese. And to everyone I’m not thinking of at 5am but you know you’ll be in my heart by 6:15… thank you for being in this world and in my life and letting me in yours.

10. And I’m thankful to these two. I’ve never met them. The last time Detroit won the football championship, I was 3. Now they’re great. The team is owned by this woman (Shelia Ford Hamp who was in the first graduating class at Yale that let women go there. She also coaches youth soccer in Ann Arbor and is on the board of Jeff Daniels’ Purple Rose Theater). The team is run by this brilliant Black man (General Manager Brad Holmes), and an amazing coach, Dan Campbell, and a stunning roster of young players who somehow make this game less violent as they magically weave and float their way down the field. It looks more like ballet. Yeah. I said that. Stroh’s anyone?

They have all brought a bit joy to a place that rarely has much to feel good about. And for that we are thankful. From the city left for dead — but none of you forgot us — the people who gave you Aretha, Smokey, Diana, Madonna, Marshall Mathers, Iggy Pop, Seger, Francis Ford Coppola, Gilda Radner, Robin Williams, Thomas Edison (raised in Port Huron) and all the inventors who put us on wheels — and the city where Rosa Parks spent 48 years of her life helping the constituents of Michigan’s 1st Congressional District.

Enjoy the day and the feast and the things you are thankful for. Peace to all.

Better days are ahead.

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Image: Tea Republic

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