To Speak Gratitude is courteous and pleasant, to enact gratitude is generous and noble, but to live gratitude is to touch Heaven. –Johannes A. Gaertner

Greetings Dear Ones!

Just before closing time, the back doorbell starts to clang with an incessant, irritating jangle that penetrates every nerve of my spine, all the way to my feet, which are now running to make it stop. I open the door and see the set face and pursed lips of one of our more familiar customers. She is lithe and spry and perfectly capable of walking to the front door but she insists on leaning against the back buzzer until we come running every time. She brushes past me, down the corridor, into the work space and announces that “Someone,” her eyes narrow and scan the shop for culprits, has hemmed her jacket sleeves a fraction too much and now she cannot wear the jacket. She slips it on to show us. It looks perfect. We all chime in and agree. What is wrong? We wonder. She extends her arms forward. “I can see just a little too much wrist when I do this,” she explains. “Hanging by my sides, yes, it looks fine, but out in front, it doesn’t.”

“Yes,” we explain, “but we take the measurement while the arm is hanging at your side. This is perfect.”

“Well WHO goes around with their arms hanging by their sides all day long? No One! I drive, I type, I eat… I need my arms out in front to do these things.”

“Fine,” we say. “Of course, we want you to be Happy. Of course we will fix this. How much lower would you like these?”

“About an eighth of an inch would be perfect,” she says stiffly and turns to leave. This work, naturally, will be at no cost to her, since we “got it wrong” the first time. When she has marched out the back door again and slammed it, I look at the jacket more closely. Shit. Cut buttonholes! This means the buttons at the wrist are not merely decorative. They actually work. This means that redoing this jacket to change it an eighth of an inch means we have to take both sleeves off at the shoulder again and adjust it there; we cannot simply let down a hem at the sleeve’s edge. What a total pain in the arse… This will be hours of work, rather than minutes. It occurs to me as I hang the jacket on the hanger and put it on the rack of things to do, that I have never once heard this customer say “Thank you.” She has told us we are “The Best.” She has said she “would never consider going anywhere else” (oh, please!!!Why not???) and all sorts of “Compliments” like that over the years. But I cannot ever once recall being Thanked. I suppose she thinks we don’t need to be thanked when we are being paid.

I cannot tell you, in a service industry like ours, how Grateful I am for Gratitude. It’s as good as a tip, to be honest. Sometimes better. We have been tipped with such disdain as to make us feel crummy for accepting the money—as if we are colluding in our own degradation. And we have been thanked so kindly as to feel like we just earned a million bucks. To see a customer’s eyes warmly alight with pleasure and recognition of a job well-done is one of the things that keeps me doing this sort of work. Thanking really matters.

This Thanksgiving week, we pause our hectic lives to take seriously our twin Patriotic Duties: Gluttony and Bargain Hunting. Thursday, we give thanks for all we have. Friday, we go out and clobber each other in the malls for MORE. The season of Spending Hysteria commences before the last bite of turkey can be digested. It makes me wonder, if you aren’t thankful for what you have already, how can you hope to be thankful for what you get? “It’s not about Getting,” says Prudence. “It’s about Giving! This begins the Season of Giving. Giving is what really counts. You must give and not think of yourself.” I call BS. The older I get, the more I feel Giving is overdone and overrated.

Don’t get me wrong. I love it that we as a nation have a holiday just for Giving Thanks. But Giving is only half of the equation. The circle of Giving requires Receivers. Too many gifts are wasted because they are not received. What does Thanking mean? To me, it means Receiving. We open our eyes and fully Receive what people are doing for us, with us, because of us. We taste the Love in the home baking, in the sweet potato casserole, and in your cousin’s willingness to sit at the kid’s table. We also Receive the beauty of the environment—the frosty dawns and sunsets, the shimmer of fog on the lake, the way trees hold each others’ toes and hands, dancing silently along each side of the road as we drive… Meister Eckhart is quoted as saying “If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough.” I think this is true.

It’s important to count our blessings. It’s the first step towards making our blessings count. Because if you are truly grateful, what do you do? You share! When Giving come from our Gratitude, not in search of it, then we are making our gifts count.

These days, I am Grateful for quite a lot. I’ve been keeping a list, daily, for a long time now. The list is way too long to post in its entirety, so I will only share a few of the things that stand out as relevant to my secret life as a seamstress. Some of these things, you will note, are rather tiny; others are huge. I am Grateful for them all:

· Good lighting

· Bobbins that last for a whole seam

· Finding the perfect match of thread color for a chartreuse bridesmaid’s gown

· Threading a needle on the first try, without magnifying glasses, tweezers, bleeding, or cursing.

· Discovering that someone ahead of me put all the right colors for my project on the Serger (which has four needles and four threads to change) Ya Beauty!!!

· People who, when they poop their pants, wash them BEFORE bringing them in for us to fix.

· People who call ahead and ask us if it is ok to bring in forty-three items on their next visit (it’s really NOT but if you call ahead, we don’t resent you as much as when you just show up and spontaneously announce that we will be spending the rest of the day watching you parade your by-gone-glad-rags…)

· Anyone who brings us cookies!

· Prudence is thankful for well-behaved children who honor their mothers and fathers and who don’t stick all the pins from the pin cushions into the waiting area furniture.

· People who do not use the unventilated dressing room as the location to relieve themselves of the effects of last night’s chili cook-off. (Have I mentioned this room is UN-ventilated! Look at the ceiling, people, before you let go!)

· When the cutting table has no glitter on it (this is a RARE gift indeed!)

· Realizing that the whole zipper is not broken, only the pulley is, so I won’t have to be cutting into a down jacket and releasing forty-five pounds of fluff and feathers into the shop afterall!

· Sober, well-grounded customers who talk neither too little nor too much about how they came to have this particular garment and its problems.

· People who address (A-dress?) honestly their needs and limitations and agree to work willingly within the parameters of what is Possible.

· My dearly beloved co-workers who so generously share their tools, skills, and knowledge with me on a daily basis. They are amazing and inspiring. I “receive” with respect and admiration all that they have given me of themselves in the past five years. I could not be luckier to work with such creative and talented ladies!

· Easy customers with easy problems.

· Tough customers with tough problems.

Yes, seriously. I am grateful for the lady with the cut buttonholes and her lack of gratitude. She is responsible for the expansion of my soul far more than she could ever possibly guess, and far more so than the easily beloved creatures who smile and make every transaction so simple. I am reminded of the quote that says something like “The people most in need of love are showing it in the most UN-loveable ways…” or something to that effect. I love her crabby attitude because it teaches me something about how loveable each one of us could be if we stopped thinking that the length of our sleeves is what is repellant to others, rather than the sour expression on our faces. I ponder what would happen if this woman loved Herself—was fully grateful for the Gift of Herself—if all her fussing over her sleeves would matter so much? If she had an ‘Attitude of Gratitude,’ how could her life transform? How could mine? How could any of ours?

It sounds odd to say—in the midst of a national conversation about “Narsicism”—that I am profoundly grateful for Myself. I’m glad I’m here. Having lost dear friends over the years, I know that Tomorrow is not promised. I’m Lucky. I may not be here for a long time so I have decided to have a Good time, rather than a “perfect” time. The more I love myself, the less I care what shape or size my bum is, or whether or not my hair looks like an uprooted tree on fire. I’m beginning to be delighted with All of me—even the bit that totally forgets everything but half the chorus to a song or where I put the wallet and car keys. Loving others is making it easy to forgive myself for being Me and loving Me is making it way easier for me to forgive others—including those I may have given birth to who have wracked up so many parking fines in Boston that I have had to confiscate the car. I’m excited to wake up each day and say to myself, “well, my Dear, what are you going to get into today?” It’s fun to spend a whole day with myself, laughing at my own nonsense.

Loving myself also makes me Most Grateful for you, dear readers, who are willing to go with me on this Journey—to the fellow travelers who listen, read, laugh—who write back to me or share these posts with others who may enjoy them. About 64% of you actually open your emails each week, to spend a few moments with my nonsense, and I am both surprised and profoundly touched and grateful for that. I’m grateful that the work of my hands can hang in your closets and that the work of my Spirit can hang in your thoughts. With great humility, I appreciate so much your willingness to Receive.

Enjoy your feasting, Dear Ones, wherever you may be. Know the prayer of my heart is “Thank YOU.” Yes, YOU. Receive that as best you can and remember Oscar Wilde’s wisdom: “After a good dinner, one can forgive anybody, even one’s own relations.”

With Hearty Thanks and Much, much joyous Love,

Yours aye,

Nancy