Yesterday was the official day of handing out our thanks to anyone who would listen. With luck, we not only thought about doing that, but actually did so. Out loud. And, with even more luck, we also had some takers, in between thunderclaps of footballer collisions from our Big Scream teevees, and the assorted sonic booms of industry and inventiveness erupting from kitchen and guests.
You might have even been so lucky as to have been heard above the acoustic carnage of the day, and, luckier still, to have received knowing, thoughtful, insightful, and sincere replies along the same lines.
I mean, I can wish that such becalmed seas ferried you along softly and sweetly yesterday, and in the golden photographer's light of dawn or dusk, all the while sipping a profoundly satisfying adult entertainment beverage, but the odds are pretty much against it, I'd imagine -- like hoping Aunt Smelda would please, please forget to bring over her famous Jell-O mold, with odd bits of things suspended in the gelatin (some identifiable and mostly edible, others of a baffling, mysterious origin) like a forgetful, absent-minded cook's version of bugs trapped in amber.
You know, for my money, you just can't get too much cosmic serenity. So, I hope you were able to find some quiet moments of grateful reflection, there among the ringing of our ears by our ritual televised mania, and amid the jumbled chaos of that Short Attention Span Theatre created when way too much happens all at once in a small, confined space, and with at least 50 percent more people on hand than we really have chairs for.
Amid all the noise and haste, and all the joys and waste of our Food Fight of a holiday, here's hoping you were able to find some opportunities to go placidly through the day, rather than mandatorily scissoring through it on a jagged adrenalin wave, on Maximum Jangled setting, scampering and sprinting as if beset by rabid timber wolves, your still-smoldering, blast-scorched hair describing the state of the day, as though you'd had an earlier, accidental encounter between your fingers and a wall outlet or two.