(GK: Garrison Keillor, SS: Sue Scott, TK: Tom Keith, TR: Tim Russell, RD: Rich Dworsky)
I am thankful for a number of things, and one is that Thanksgiving is over. I had a hard time with my turkey. Next year I'm going to broil the traditional Thanksgiving tuna. You turn on the broiler, you sprinkle some oil on the fish, put it on a pan, five minutes on one side, three on the other, so it's pink in the middle. Add salt and pepper as needed. You don't stuff it. Put a couple of boiled new potatoes alongside and some string beans, in honor of your mother, and you're there.
Licorice herbal tea, I'm thankful for. It is so delicious, and I had no idea there was such a thing until this week.
And I'm thankful the new shower knob at our house. It's the first shower control that lets you set water temperature apart from volume. You turn the control to, say, 110 degrees, or 111, and then crank on the water and water of that precise temperature falls down on you. This is a huge leap forward for me and my people. There is also a ring on the shower head to adjust the density of downpour, from Light Mist to Scattered Showers to Flash Flood, but it's the separate temp control that I am grateful for. Our old knob was a joke knob from the novelty store that gave you a water temperature of 41 degrees or 180, whichever you preferred, and I am thankful for this advance. So thankful that I'd like to sing a hymn to my shower.
Why should I feel discouraged
Why should I mourn or grieve
Why should my heart be heavy
Thinking of New Year's Eve?
I've suffered such discomforts
I burn or else I freeze,
But I'm in a shower of blessings
At a hundred ten degrees.
I sing because I'm happy
I sing because I'm pure
The Lord has sent shower of blessings
At a steady temperature.
I don't know how it works. I have no idea. My grasp of mechanics is straight out of fairy tales: good spirits and bad spirits, a labyrinth of tiny rooms inside the shower knob where tiny people in pointy shoes labor to maintain water temperature and afterward they roast chestnuts at the fire and tell legends about giant one-eyed plumbers. Everything mechanical I have to take on trust.
But it changes your life to have a shower knob like this, to not have to stand there, naked, shivering, at 7 in the morning, trying to adjust the hot and the cold. And step into the tub knowing that the delicate balance you've worked out could come down like a house of cards and you'd suddenly be hit by blazing hot water and you'd step out of the tub and fall and how many guys your age have fallen in the bathtub and knocked something off-kilter down there in the lower back and had to resign from their job hosting a radio show and began their long lonely odyssey through orthopedics and chiropractics and a long series of doctors' waiting rooms and thousands of pages of HMO forms, bales of them, and then the remortgage on the home to pay for the first operation, and years later winding up at the lower-back ashram in Rawalpindi where the Maharahi applies warm bananas to your butt and covers you with ashes from the sacred fire, so you step carefully across the slippery floor and suddenly you catch a glimpse of aging flesh in a shaving mirror and it's never your good side, your shoulders or your wrists, it's the Rubenesque rest of you, your peasant haunches, your feedbag belly, your matronly pectorals. This is so disheartening (because in your heart you are still winsome and pert and skinny) and you feel so emotionally vulnerable as you climb into the shower and then, it's a little cold, so you reach for the Hot to crank it up and instead crank it down and an arctic avalanche descends on you and it's almost enough to unhinge a man----but this doesn't happen to me anymore.....
If I were a better person
I'd stand beneath a pail
Pull a rope and down would come
Water cold as hail.
I'd dry myself with burlap
And according to my vow
Of poverty and silence
I wouldn't be singing now.
I sing because I'm happy
I sing cause I'm not cold,
I'm standing in the shower
Where the temperature's controlled.
I tell you this, young people. You get older and you learn that happiness is in the details. People who study the Larger Picture are bound to get depressed. Look at academics, a very gloomy bunch. Economists. They're all depressed. But people like me, we wake up in the morning and think, "Toast. Hot toast with butter." and we feel happy.
I grew up among fundamentalists, who always looked at the Big Picture. The Second Coming, the Tribulation, Armageddon, the Last Judgement. They weren't so interested in little things like kindness as they were in prophecy. And they always preached about how joyful and thankful we ought to be and they just never seemed joyful to me, they didn't even seem faintly amused.
I thank you, Lord, for your mercies,
For trying to show me the way.
The directions are somewhat confusing
But I trust I will get there someday.
But meanwhile thanks for the coffee,
For the bagels and the cream cheese,
For the New York Times and the shower
Of a hundred and ten degrees.
I sing because I'm happy
I sing because I'm free
I sing because I'm in the shower
And it feels so good to me.
(c) 1999 by Garrison Keillor