I give thanks for Ogden Nash, my old friends, my father, etc.

I'd like to thank my father for reading Ogden Nash to me. At least I remember his boyish face, his eyes alive with the impending mirth, the expectation that Nash would bend us double with laughter. When I actually read Nash poems, I wonder if my memory is correct: "Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker" is one observation I don't think my father ever shared with us as he sat on the edge of my bed. And I was a young adult when I read about the clever turtle being so fertile, and I was older still--just turning NOW, as a matter of fact, when I found the gentle account of Miranda turning thirty: "How old is spring?" the poem finishes. And it was only last winter that Martin gave a splitting reading of that fabulous fable, "The Boy Who Laughed at Santa Claus."

But I am not giving a shout-out to Ogden, but to my father. Actually, scratch that. WHAT HO, OGDEN! YOU ROCK! It's not every man who can write a two line poem about a cow that makes me laugh out loud. Make yourself thankful for belly laughs this year and go read some zappy shorts. Please, I beg you, do not skip the one on parsley.

Leave dear Ogden for a minute, jollyish reader, and return to my white-haired, bushy-eyebrowed, laughs-through-his-nose father. He read to us for hours when we were children, mastering voices and even singing when called on by the text, though his singing voice sounds like Winnie the Pooh's. He read us everything from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, (where I first heard about menstruation) to the entire Lord of the Rings series, which we stretched out over our interminable summer car rides when we were on leave from Kenya. Go back further than that and I have my father's voice calling out the islands of Maine in Robert McCloskey's Time of Wonder --his voice is imprinted so strongly on those words that I still cry every time I read it to my own children.

My father travelled quite a lot, and I remember the smell of his suitcase as he unzipped the old, fake leather and threw it open. Nestled among his socks and toothbrush were small gifts for us. If he'd been back to America, the open suitcase smelled like ziplock bags and drugstores and my grandmama's house in Pennsylvania. If he'd been to Thailand or Dacca, the suitcase was damp with humidity and smelled of sweat, dust, and spices.

I just chatted with my mother on the phone as she floated across the Puget Sound to join my sister and her family and my brother for Thanksgiving. Here I am, sitting at a table covered with my mother's old blue tablecloth, spun in India; the white stripes in the cloth start at Martin, who works at the other end of the table, and flow all the way across to me. Silver sage from our garden dries among candles; there's a painted leaf Merry brought home from school and a paper with an upside down heart and the word MOM that Elspeth presented to me this afternoon. A box of Kleenex (Bea has a cold), the roar of the heater, lamplight glowing on our mantle clock. The sounds of my father's voice deep down inside of me, my mother's laugh fresh in my ears. I give thanks for all of it, for the glitter and drop and water-flow of so many stories, for the way they fill me with color.