Some Thoughts On Gratitude
Earlier this afternoon, my honey and I had a lunch date at Dino’s Greek & Italian Grill. At the moment, my system is swamped with a surfeit of carby goodness and the will to sustain any sort of eloquent expression of thought is nil. The food, the ambiance, the personability of the waitress (for those of you who are local) were all delightful, by the way. I’m going to try and snap my fingers at my carb engorged brain now and encourage it to some semblance of order past repeatedly mumbling “nummy num num”…but it’s not going to be easy, so bear with me.
For years now I have written personalized gratitude notes to people who have been involved with our family. I have lately been thinking that I also want to intersperse just some other events or happenings that I have been grateful for…in part because I am running out of people to thank and I’d rather not start getting completely redundant. This month seems as good as any to lead in with a circumstance rather than a person that has lately filled my world with joy.
As some of you know, recently I was retested for some of the newer food allergies that cropped up last year after I developed Mast Cell Activation Syndrome. The plan had been to avoid the items and see if my system calmed down about them over time, because sometimes that happens and a person’s system can again tolerate an item it was reacting to. When I was a little girl, that is how they handled an egg allergy I had as a toddler and I’ve been able to eat things with eggs in them for many years now.
When the results were read for the latest round of testing, I was cleared to start slowly introducing everything but avocado and mango back into my diet and see how it goes. For me, one of the hardest things about the food restrictions of the past year emotionally was loosing the ability to be vegetarian (but I kept every single one of those cookbooks because I wasn’t willing to give up hope that my system would calm down). Lentils and beans of any kind had started causing hives and respiratory symptoms consistently every time I ate them. Emotionally, on top of everything else that was going on, it was incredibly hard, almost too much for me really.
So far, lentils, pinto beans, black beans, chick peas…they’re all back in my diet and not causing any symptoms of any kind. Cinnamon, Xylitol, and oranges are also back. I am really just flooded and overcome emotionally with how happy being able to return to vegetarianism has made me, how much it has meant to me. And now, I’m not as worried about asking my PCP for a different cardiology recommendation. They typically recommend a woman of my age get some sort of baseline check up on that, but I wasn’t too keen on being told I had any type of heart disease on top of the POTS without the ability to try Ornish’s diet. One of the former cardiologists said to me about that, “Why would you want to be on Ornish’s diet?” Well, I actually like Ornish’s diet and would find it preferable to surgery or meds…so it’s a lot to be grateful for, from my perspective. And the other food items…they just improve my quality of life. Cinnamon brings the happy. So, that is something that has come into my life this past month for which I am profoundly grateful.
Some Reading To Consider
When the Emperor was Divine, by Julie Otsuka
Last month, I read a news article from NBC that had me both upset and curious. A school district in another state was not wanting to use a particular novel based on the WWII Japanese Internment Camps because, allegedly, it didn’t have “an American perspective.” You can click on this sentence for a link to that news article. I decided that the best way I could determine how I felt about the situation was to read the book myself. But, I also didn’t stop there, I went on to try and look at some of the source material the author cites, and found that getting digital copies wasn’t the easiest…so I ended up on archive.org, where a free account allowed me to view A Fence Away From Freedom: Japanese Americans and World War II, by Ellen Levine.
In doing both of these, I felt like if I were a parent in that district, I might find my justice loving self saying Otsuka’s novel didn’t go far enough in bringing to life the perspectives and experiences of those who were so wrongly incarcerated and that I just might prefer Levine’s book with first person interviews for that. When the Emperor was Divine is written from the perspective of three Americans from the same family incarcerated in one of those camps simply because they had Japanese ancestry. The writing has almost a dreamlike quality in that it describes some details of what is happening but doesn’t become too bogged down in describing the emotions of the characters, the narration simply flits around without much sentimental elaboration.
And yet, it does a great job of slamming home the point that Japanese Americans were dehumanized in this process by not giving readers the main characters names. Perhaps maybe too, that could allow a careful reader to step themselves into the circumstances and think about what it would feel like if this was done to them. The book shows the loss of status, damage to property, damage to mental and emotional health endured by the family in a way that simply invites each of us to look at what happened, leaving the reader to determine much of the moral to the story. Was it the right thing to do? Was it a humane thing to do? Individual answers might vary on that. But, was it an American thing to do? Perhaps…our modern country was built on a history of genocide (as regards to indigenous populations) and enslavement of African peoples, so in that light, from my perspective, a novel that accurately depicts an ugly chapter from our nation’s history can only be seen as thoroughly American and I could find nothing in this book that should keep it off of any school’s curriculum list. I found it a heartbreaking read, but one I can recommend nonetheless.
