Usually I have a pretty superficial relationship with Thanksgiving: it’s a day off work and a turkey dinner, which is reason enough to celebrate. But it occurred to me this morning, as I lay in bed snuggling with Duncan, that I have some extra reasons to be thankful this year.
I’m thankful for a nurse named Sarah, at the Ontario Breast Screening Program at Hampton Park Plaza, who discovered the tumour in my breast even though it went undetected by a mammogram.
At the time this didn’t seem like a lucky break. Quite the opposite. But if she hadn’t found it, it would still be in there, symptomless and undetected, gaining ground, growing more dangerous by the day. Instead, it’s gone.
I’ve had other experiences in my life that seemed like terrible luck at the time, but which I later realized were extraordinarily fortunate.
For example, I once found out, in the most bizarre way imaginable, that someone was cheating on me. While he was having sex with a woman in his car, she sat on his phone – right on the Last Number Redial button. His phone called my phone, and my answering machine recorded the next three minutes of what was going on his car, from the audio perspective of her ass.
As you might imagine, this was a harrowing message to listen to.
Even though it was irrefutable proof that he was cheating on me, when I confronted him later he tried to refute it with blatant lies. I realized not long afterward that he was a pathological liar. He had lied to me every chance he got, even when there was no advantage or benefit to lying. He just liked lying.
You know, it wasn’t even a good relationship, but I still felt crushed and betrayed by the cheating and lying. That kind of thing can really make you doubt yourself. You start wondering why you didn’t see the obvious signs, and if you were somehow complicit in the betrayal. How come you were so easy to deceive? How many other untrustworthy people have you trusted in your life? How can you ever trust yourself or anyone else again?
The whole thing rattled me badly, and after a couple of weeks I went to see a counselor about it. I told her the whole sordid story and you know what she said?
“Wow. Are you ever lucky!”
I looked up at her, startled. “What do you mean?”
“It’s almost like someone out there is watching out for you,” she said, “By making sure you found out what you needed to know.”
Happy Thanksgiving everybody. I hope you all find something to be thankful for this year, even if you have to look in the unlikeliest of places.
“An obstacle is often a stepping stone.” Prescottâ€
Happy Thanksgiving Zoom! And thank you for all your great stories.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Oh man, my old cell phone used to call home all the time when I was working. It would leave 5 minute messages of the sound of my walking (parachute material shorts that summer, they made a lot of noise) and the occasional distant muffled voices with my replying. It was hysterical. I learned my lesson and will only ever have clamshells/flip-phones from now on! That is a really terrible message to get though, but it sure was a blessing!
that sounds like it must have been possibly the most unpleasant answerphone message ever received by anyone ever, yet at the same time hugely helpful to you in terms of the information you really needed to have.
Years ago my then boyfriend, who I’d been with for over three years, effectively broke up with me by accidentally sending me a text he had meant to send to a friend, telling the friend he was feeling quite upset about having dumped me (at that point he hadn’t officially dumped me) and would the friend meet up with him in a pub to cheer him up (poor soul). At the time this was horrendously upsetting as I was still clinging on to some hope we might sort out our difficulties, but having read your post just now it occurs to me that it was actually a good & helpful thing, as it speeded up the whole nasty process of the break up.
Definitely true that sometimes what seems absolutely awful at the time turns out to be the best possible thing that could have happened. Thanks for reminding me of this.
I’ve spent years agonizing over defaulted on student loans. At one point I was looking at bankruptcy and I was so poor at the time I couldn’t afford the bankruptcy fees. Then I was going to start paying them off and my ex stopped paying child support.
Turns out, if I’d started paying them in the tiny amounts a month I could afford, my family would be in major crap financially right now, (like lose our house and not be able to afford rent crap). The debt is now so old it doesn’t show up on my credit history at all, not as a default, and not as existing debt.
Which means once we get some things in order I can either continue to ignore them, or actually pay them off with respectable sized payments each month. I haven’t decided what to do yet. I’ve lived with them as a cloud over my financial head for 16 years. I kinda feel like the stress of that is worth the value of the loans!
Really liked this post. And yes, I did find some things to be thankful for this year.
thanks, zoom, for the gift that keeps on giving – my dad looked sad when i told him that leading u.s. dissident noam chomsky, scholar of historic dimensions and ‘friend of the show’ on the “left”, accepts the conclusions of sub-committee investigations into oswald, 9-11, etc and has no comment on the bildenburg council/trilateral commission/ c.f.a. business; then i mentioned your two providential disasters, which were as ‘smelling assaults’ to the intoxicating dream of informed dialogue at the push of a (keyboard) button…well it’s all smiles now!