A Few of My Favorite Things

Thanksgiving is the day we give thanks for the big things…family, freedom, food, health, happiness, etc. Black Friday is the day we give thanks for the useless things. Today I give thanks for the small things:

Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittensBright copper kettles and warm woolen mittensCream colored ponies and crisp apple streudelsDoorbells and sleigh bells and schnitzel with noodles

Okay, maybe not that small. But without making dinner guests bow their heads to join me, I do want to take some time in this season of gratitude to acknowledge some of the more modest pleasures in my life, like...
$10 a bottle wine. That’s my price point when shopping for wine, established on my two personal pillars of vinification. The first is that any idiot can buy a good expensive bottle of wine, it takes patience and truly discriminating taste to bring home a satisfying budget vintage. The other is that to spend much more than $10 a bottle would drive me to bankruptcy in that I drink two glasses of wine every day. So when I find an enjoyable bottle of $10 wine I become a regular Little Danny Horner pleased as punch to put in my thumb and pull out a plum (take a bow, Seven Deadly Zins).  But here’s the thing, whenever I travel to a wine-depressed area, like Connecticut, and I find one of those favorites of mine on the shelf for twice as much as it costs in California, it suddenly loses its allure and place in my favorite things pantheon to some local bargain basement drink, like pink Catawba.
Pandora. Thank you, music gods, for letting me live enough to experience Pandora Radio. If not for Pandora, my musical experience would be frozen in that elegiac time around The Last Waltz…not a bad place to be frozen actually…certain Neanderthals should be so lucky. But Pandora allows me to keep one foot in my cherished past and my more tender other foot in the now. Whenever Stephen Colbert introduces a musical act that wows me in the final five minutes of his show, I immediately add a station for that performer to my Pandora list. Thus my list boasts the likes of Feist, Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, Pink, The Preacher, LCD Soundsystem...infusions of enough new blood to keep the old age home at bay for another decade or so. Weekends around the house are pure musical alchemy as the new groups magically mix with old standbys—Dylan, Dusty Springfield, Van Morrison, Beatles--from breakfast to dinner. The synchronicity with my moods and tastes is so unified that there are days, I swear, they’re programming the damned thing by beaming my brainwaves into their little black box.
French Sex Films. On Sunday last we watched another episode of HBO’s Boardwalk Empire. This is the one where uber thug Gyp Rosetti buries one of his minions in sand up to his neck for the crime of knowing more than Gyp knows and proceeds to bludgeon his head with a shovel. Shortly thereafter, Margaret’s secret lover Owen is sent to her home butchered and bloodied and crated up in a box. A night later we watched the French film Elles, where a journalist played by the always-exquisite Juliette Binoche interviews two young women who are subsidizing their academic studies by working as call girls. We hear the girls in interviews describe and explain all manner of sexual favors they are paid to perform, including allowing one girl’s client to pee on her. I was struck, though not for the first time, by how different American and French cultures are in regards to their respective treatments of sex and violence. I don’t see enough violent French films to know if they’re ever more than totally derivative of American violence, which really does seem to be one of our enduring gifts to the world. But I have seen enough French sex-themed films to know that they can pull off a scene of a young woman being peed on by an older man with all the aplomb of Martin Scorsese ordering up another battering of a man’s head. And whereas American audiences take such batterings in stride with nary a wince, they would turn away in loud howls of “Ewwwwww!” to watch a comely co-ed take a golden shower.  In the real world, of course, the latter happens far more often than the former, which is the great service the French do for us in spite of ourselves. They explore such things that are far beyond the reach of America’s arrested development in the making of sex films. Forty-Year Old Virgin?  The perfect high, funny concept that we can hit out of the park with our perpetually juvenile view of sexuality. Forty-year Old Man Who has to Pay a Young Woman for Sex? Way too damn complex and scary for American filmmakers. So we need the French to explore such sexual realities that young women allow older men to pee on them and to tell us why that might be and what it says about marriage, loneliness, boredom, gender commerce, and growing old. There are just so many life lessons we can draw from constantly watching men get their heads bashed by other men. So merci beaucoup, Frenchies.
Solitude. This is a bit of cheat. It really could be in the category of the biggies, but how do you look at the sea of loving faces gathered around the Thanksgiving feast and say, Thank you, Jesus, for solitude. I mean, even though the man himself spent forty days wandering the desert alone, solitude is still looked upon suspiciously in our culture. We have a mania for socializing—social clubs, social media, social networking…collaboration, socializing’s drab disguise in the workplace. “Works well with others…” I vividly recall that as being high atop the list of attitude categories they graded us on way back in elementary school long before Oprah and Facebook came along to turn that virtue into big business. “Works well with self"?…not so much, which brings one of my favorite Springsteen verses to mind: Now a life of leisure and a pirate's treasure/Don't make much for tragedy/But it's a sad man my friend who's livin' in his own skin/And can't stand the company. Solitude is where I write my blog, of course…where I think about what I’m going to write in my blog…think about the people I’ve met and what I’ve learned about them…plan for my future, reflect on my past, cope with my fears, and engage my fantasies. I’m a lucky man to have been long involved with a woman who appreciates solitude as much as I do and never begrudges me a moment alone.
iPad. This is my first year with my iPad, and I’m still transitioning from my deeply satisfying love affair with my laptop to this technological marvel that comes in the shape and heft of a menu for an unpretentious restaurant. It allows me to search for $10 bottles of wine, play my Pandora stations, watch sexy French films, maintain my solitude and sanity simultaneously…take pictures, save pictures, send pictures, read books, follow my teams, rant about politics, map my most confounding thoughts, and find my way home. If I wanted to, I guess, I’d be able to download an app that would provide me with Girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes/Snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes/Silver white winters that melt into springs…in short, all of my favorite things.