I'm thankful for the Mother Mary

It’s Thanksgiving, the day our republic has appointed for us to be thankful.

So … I’m thankful this Thanksgiving for the people around me who don’t complain about their hardships or the deficits of others. This expression of thankfulness will require taking space to complain about complainers, which makes me guilty of the attribute I condemn, but extremism in the defense of thankfulness is no vice.

I’m thankful for my mother-in-law, Mary. She’s 97 years old and she’s a real Mother Mary.

Mother Mary had to go to the hospital a couple of nights ago after she passed out while doing dishes, and she banged her ankle enroute to the kitchen floor. I visited her in the hospital the next afternoon while the rehab nurse was figuring how to treat her tender ankle, and Mother Mary was patiently answering the nurse’s questions about the details of her pain. The patient was patient.

Mother Mary seemed most concerned about helping the nurse do her job, not about her own suffering. After the nurse finished, Mother Mary spent a few minutes combing her hair before ordering dinner, a chef’s salad. “And I’ll have a chocolate cookie for dessert,” she said, smiling.

Two summers ago, Mother Mary broke her hip, underwent surgery, and spent a few weeks recovering in a care center. She had the X-ray of her broken hip pinned on the wall above her bed and she’d tell me about her surgery and her new anatomy, about the doctor who was flown in from across the country to operate on her, and anything else that popped into that agile brain of hers. She had few complaints, just a genuine interest in the details of what life was delivering.

Twice I visited when Mary had another visitor, and this particular visitor spent her time complaining about her own health problems, her doctors, the U.S. medical system, her insurance provider, other people, her spouse, the government, her job, traffic. The list was extensive and exhausting. She was with a 95-year-old fresh from hip surgery and this visitor was most focused on her own complaints.

Because asking a complainer to stop complaining is as effective as asking a cat to fetch, I asked a wise friend of mine, Virginia Painter, whether she had any tips on getting this visitor to stop complaining around Mother Mary. Virginia had brilliant advice: The next time the complainer starts up around my mother-in-law, interrupt and start complaining about my life. Make stuff up, if I have to. Then stop and say, “Oh, here I am complaining about my life while you’re lying there with a broken hip. I’m so sorry.”

I didn’t get the opportunity to put Virginia’s advice into play because Mother Mary was released a few days later. Next time ...

I’m also thankful for people who don’t complain about their restaurant experiences, especially while they’re inside a restaurant. Considering that one out of 10 people in this world is chronically hungry and that many more than that can’t afford to eat in a restaurant, complaining about food that has been hand-delivered to you seems wildly out of whack.

I like when people don’t complain about traffic. What’s the point? Complaining won’t open the road. I drive to Seattle two or three times a month to fetch my youngest son and I’m often caught in turtle traffic, but I consider it an easy opportunity to spend more time with “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend,” a podcast packed with funny people who laugh and make me laugh. It makes bad traffic disappear.

I like people who don’t believe they can do someone else’s job better than the person who has been trained and is sometimes extensively educated to do the job. Last month, I was talking to someone who commutes from Everett to Mercer Island when she went off on the “stupid people” who designed the exit lanes from southbound Interstate 5 to Interstate 405.

The people who design roads — civil engineers — need a particular set of hard-earned and hard-learned skills, including knowing how much a specific material will strain under various conditions, and a thorough knowledge of calculus, especially differential equations. What degree of delusion is that commuter under to believe that she could do a civil engineer’s job better than a civil engineer? Oh. I know. She probably has “common sense.”

Last one: I’m thankful to have a house, especially when it’s raining and cold. What a wonderful possession that is.