The Perfect Thanksgiving

First off, how can any day that includes a major focus on eating turkey and mashed potatoes be anything but perfect??!!

The Perfect Thanksgiving includes the traditionals: Food. Family. Sincere prayers to God to thank Him for the good things we have... even if they seem to be not as massive or endless as in other years. (Do atheists celebrate Thanksgiving? Who do they give thanks to? Themselves? The cosmic particles which were part of the big bang?)

Memories clearly contribute to the Perfect Thanksgiving. Showing my age, Thanksgiving was the day when the Christmas season began. Thanksgiving's newspaper was huge, broken into a million sections and packed with ads...especially ads for toys! We could start making our Christmas list that very day after seeing for the first time what was available. That's when shopping for toys meant finding the toy department in one or more of the large downtown department stores that we would get to via a bus, since neither my mom nor dad drove (and I was born in the 50's, not the Great Depression, thank you!). It was certainly memorable and special, and, I think, probably better than seeing Christmas decorations available for purchase as early as September.

Thanksgiving is still the day each year that I shave using the ceramic mug and bristled brush my father gave me when he taught me to shave more than 40 years ago. In all honesty, the lather is not as rich and comfortable as what now comes out of a can, so the shaving stings a little more. But it's my annual homage to my dad, and the sting is worth the memory.

Perfect includes days of leftovers, a four-day weekend, the debut of Christmas lights on houses, and the arrival of the Christmas and New Years season. (With no offense to anyone, and all best wishes for other celebrations this time of year, I still wish people Merry Christmas.) While on a four-day weekend, we know there are more days off built into the schedule, arriving in just a few weeks.

Watching the Thanksgiving Day football game is not critical for a perfect T-Day for me. This year, however, there is the anticipation and inevitable bantering that will come with the classic Ohio State/Michigan battle on the Saturday AFTER Thanksgiving. Another event to enjoy during the long weekend. (Go Bucks!)

And a new appreciation enters my mind this year: while actuarial tables will show that I should still notch a couple more decades to my belt, I'm not foolhardy enough to realize it could be much less. Not that I'm ill or want to die. It's just that for nearly six decades it has been Thanksgiving after Thanksgiving after Thanksgiving in a seemingly endless stream. But the mirror convinces me daily that the stream ahead is no longer endless. So I resolve to try and treasure each holiday-family time more deeply.

So, barring health issues, an unexpected emergency (and that does not mean running out of gravy) or a natural disaster, the Perfect Thanksgiving is now virtually every Thanksgiving...and I thank God I will encounter them clean-shaven.

Happy Thanksgiving to you!

You go, Chris!

Chris Voigt is my kind of guy!! Join me in giving him a round of applause!!

Chris is in the midst of eating nothing but potatoes for two months. (How can a blog with the words mashed potatoes in the title NOT salute a guy like that?)

I applaud him for the potato action, as well as the broader philosophical question this raises.

Chris is executive director of the Washington State Potato Commission, and is doing this to help fight the bad image (among those who don't love potatoes as much as I do) of potatoes having too many carbs, being bad for weight gain, etc.

But it turns out that, as long as Chris was healthy enough to handle all the extra potassium his spud-tacular diet would provide, potatoes provide a lot of nutrients.

Now, Chris is eating his potatoes with no sides or toppings. Personally, there have been times when I have had a late night snack of mashed potatoes (leftover fresh or instant), but I don't think I could go two months on just any one food.

But that made me look at this from a different perspective. Do we really need all the different foods that we want to eat? Do we really need all of the different things in life we want?

Chris is surviving on just potatoes, and chances are he will come out of this just fine. His effort to educate people about the value of potatoes should also teach us that we want too much generally from life. Factor in the amazing recent experience of the Chilean miners, who had so, so little to survive on, especially at first, yet they emerged as heroes. They did have an amazing faith in God. (I'm sure that if focusing on one thing in life is best way to go, that focusing on God is the one best thing on which to focus.)

Personally challenging economic times (before the major collapse of the past three or four years) literally forced me to give up on many materialistic lustings I had. My overall attitude about possessions became, "They're just things." As I recover from my own financial crises, I find myself wanting some nicer things again from time to time. But I certainly don't obsess about things like I used to, and that's quite fine with me.

Perhaps these two episodes can remind us that we too often want too much. Who knew potatoes could be so philosophical?

Stranger than ever

I intended for this blog to be consistently positive (that's why it includes the words mashed potatoes, because what could possibly be negative about potatoes?); almost any online discussion of a news post quickly dissolves into someone calling someone else a moron or stupid, etc., but the national news was just too strange today, so I want to make a couple observations that may be viewed as negative.

First, I have to say I am not in favor of people buring copies of the Quran. As a Catholic, I would be offended if someone burned or mutilated a Bible to make a statement. The USA is founded on religious freedom (which makes me wonder why some people are offended when they are wished a Merry Christmas instead of the politcally safe Happy Holidays).

Anyway, a couple observations about one area of current madness in the world:

- The media keeps reporting that Pastor Jones' plan to burn copies of the Quran on the 9/11 anniversary has become an international incident. But if the media did not devote so much attention to this single, small planned protest over the past couple weeks, would the world even know or care about the activities of one pastor and his congregation of 30 people in Florida?

- Pastor Jones' position is that the Quran advocates violence towards non-Muslims, thus the reason for his symbolic burning of the book. Footage on the news today of Muslims in foreign countries showed them protesting the pastor's planned protest by burning American flags and shouting "Kill the Christians."

Did the pastor ever say anything about killing Muslims?

- Finally, another strange aspect of this is the pastor said he might cancel the burning if he saw a sign from God, and for a while he took the sign that the imam behind the mosque near Ground Zero in New York was considering changing his plans. Then the imam is interviewed and said he can't change the location or his plans because that will put Americans at risk for attack for imposing their will on the Muslims. That seems to be saying that if the Muslims do not get what they want, they are likely to resort to physically attacking Americans.

But I'm sure that wouldn't happen, as Islam is a religion of peaceful people. Right?

Luck?

A very good friend of mine and his wife have spent a couple days a week, almost every week, for the past year helping the teen group at their Catholic parish. The newlyweds, in their 20's, share their experiences, listen, talk, counsel and help the teens, often speaking one-on-one with a teen needing guidance and a friendly ear.

A couple weeks ago my friend lost his job at a factory. It didn't pay a lot of money as it was, but the loss certainly challenges the young newlyweds.

After picking up his last paycheck, he stopped at a gas station and bought a $3 instant scratch-off lottery ticket. He won $30,000. It's not enough to set him up for life, but it does provide some serious assistance while he searches for another job in this tough economy.

Luck? Perhaps. But I think God was repaying them when they needed help after their countless hours of helping others.

Me, I'm thankful that I'm not trapped 2,000 feet below ground in a mine, hoping that I will be saved in a few months, as the poor miners are in Chile.

God is good. May God bless you.

If this blog is of any inspiration to you, perhaps you may want to help me try to put an end to Alzheimer's disease (which affected my mother for years before she died 10 years ago) by supporting my Memory Walk team. Any and all donations are welcome, and you can make a secure donation online at www.ToledoMemoryWalk2010.Kintera.org\mackowiak.

I have no idea

The above headline will probably come as no surprise to most people who know me, as I am often clueless, idealess and generally "less" than "more" in most situations.


But here I am referring to a particular situation. I saw an interview with Kevin Bacon (the actor/six degrees of separation guy) in which he is a spokesperson for Pepsi's RefreshAmerica campaign, through which they are giving away millions of dollars to support ideas that help people. Pepsi is also getting a lot of positive PR as a result of this, but as I am trying to be positive myself instead of sarcastic, I have no problem with that, as long as they are truly helping people.


Anyway, they are stil looking for more ideas, and I started thinking what helpful, innovative idea could I seek funding for while making the world a better place.


And I didn't have an idea. Still don't.


Oh, there are causes I support and certainly believe in, like the St. Vincent de Paul Society, the Alzheimer's Association, Catholic Charities and a local homeless mission, but they already exist. There are things I want to do, like write inspiring articles and some books (I already give away a book I wrote), but it is not the kind of thing Pepsi would pay me to do. And I would certainly like to see an end to hunger...but I certainly don't have a plan as to how to stop it.

Of course, if everyone had their own individual organization to fund, then larger organziations would never get donations from anyone to accomplish larger goals. But I admit that I felt like a failure when I realized that, as far as my journey of saving the world, I have not even picked out an engine to put on the track.

Stephen Hawking's question

Glad to say that I'm a dyed-in-the-wool Catholic, and that faith in God is very important to me. Of course, it doesn't mean I don't have unanswered questions.

Stephen Hawking's is a brilliant, brilliant man who has probably forgotten more than I'll ever know. He certainly has suffered a lot from his ALS, and I do feel sorry for him.

He was recently interviewed on national television where he said he prefers science to religion because science has the answers. I've read some other articles that suggest that, while Hawkings mentions God frequently in his famous A Brief History of Time, science replaces his need for a creator, and he does not believe in a benevolent God.

Which leads to Stephen Hawking's question. At the end of the interview on ABC News, he was asked what one question he would like to know the answer to. He replied (I'm paraphrasing a bit): why is there anything in the universe as opposed to being nothing.

Isn't this the same question many of us ponder when we wonder about the meaning of life? Even Hawking's vaunted science doesn't have an answer. To me, the answer to this question will only be found in religion, from God, not in science.

Maybe I've got some smarts, too, eh?

Much to learn, more to do

It's easy to pat myself on the back because I gave someone the book I wrote, helped out at a non-profit organization or donated to some cause.

But I don't have to look far to see others who do so much more:
- a co-worker who is making summer vacation plans to go to Mexico and help with a church mission project
- a student I was helping with an organization project with whom I was rather upset because he didn't provide me with content I needed. Making things worse, he went away for a week...to repair homes still damaged from Hurricane Katrina. (And how bad is your daily life if you are still realing from a disaster from several years ago?)
- my recently married son and daughter-in-law, who spend one or two nights helping young adults at a teen program at their Catholic Church parish.

Yes, it's easy to feel good about myself. It's better to see that there is still much to learn, and so much more to do.
And to admire people who do outstanding things:

Giving a Lift

My wife and I were heading out of town for an early anniversary celebration. We were barely four blocks from home when we saw a car stopped in the street…then we saw the elderly lady laying on the sidewalk! The car belonged to another women who jumped out to help the lady who had fallen; she had jumped out so quickly that her engine was still running, music was still blasting and her car door was open. We immediately pulled over, shut our engine off, and went to help. My wife, being more philanthropic than me, didn’t even grab her coat (the temperature was about the freezing mark, but I grabbed both of our coats, remembering the airplane instructions to place the oxygen mask over your own face before assisting others).

The lady who had fallen was quite coherent, although I was doubtful at first, as she said she was on her way to therapy. There was no place to walk to therapy for miles. She was pushing a wheeled walker that also had a seat on it. The lady said she was not hurt, but I feared she broke an ankle or such, that there was no one to help her and that we would spend hours waiting for 911 to arrive, and have to follow her to the hospital.

Although it may not have been wise to try to lift someone who may have had a broken bone, it also seemed not wise to leave her sitting on the cold, snowy sidewalk, waiting for other help to arrive, especially if all she needed was help getting up. I told her I would lift her, put my arms around her as my wife and the good Samaritan woman got ready to help. I lifted her, and the woman could not get her legs under her. I feared something was broken. In the process however, I could not understand why she was not all the way up, nor could I understand why she was so heavy.

Well, it turns out she was quite tall, at least as tall as me ( 5’ 11”). My second effort got her vertical, and she turned and sat on her walker.

Turns out, she did not break anything, and it turns out that she was on her way to therapy, simply waiting for her cousin to pick her up. We stayed with her and within just a couple minutes her cousin arrived. We helped her get in his vehicle, and then continued on our way.

Back in the car, I told Barb that we were destined to be there at that time. It is not a busy street in our neighborhood, it was late morning when few would have passed, and the kind lady who had already stopped to help could never have lifted her by herself.

Although I originally had a quick flash of selfishness because our departure time was delayed, I quickly got over it, not just because it was the humanitarian thing to do to help her, but I admit that it was because I felt God was challenging me to think of others, even when all I wanted to do was think selfishly about our delayed trip.

As it turned out, our trip was only delayed by a handful of minutes…but the positive feeling of helping this woman remained with me for days. She got the lift she needed from me…and I got the lift I needed from her.

Why Mashed Potatoes

What’s better than mashed potatoes?

Good, tasty, soft, filling comfort food - - even without gravy! But they don’t get that way without some serious knifing and beating.

Just like life.

Follow comments to a story on CNN.com, and within a handfull of posts someone is calling someone a moron or an idiot. Criticism of anyone and everything is rampant, probably because it is easier to tear something down than build someone up. You can easily find that sort of posting, but you won’t find it here.

I’m not sure the world needs another blog, but I felt compelled to pursue this avenue of positive articles, hope and help. Oh, I’ll probably reveal much more about myself than you’ll ever care to know, but if I offer you some useful thoughts or ideas, along with dashes of humor, then it will be worth it.

By the way, Rolando is my alter-ego, much more confident than I am. I’m just Bob Mackowiak. Thanks for coming along.