Nonconsecutive Gratitude - Garlic Bread*

What CAN'T Jeremy Be Grateful For?

On Tuesdays and Thursdays we're gonna answer the question, "How in the world can Jeremy be grateful for _______?" The blank is up to you to fill. Leave your suggestions in the comments below or find me on Instagram @nonconsecutive

I know how you probably function. If you see a delicious patty of beef then your hand instinctively goes for the ketchup. You’re gonna spread a bun, crown and heel, with mayo. Maybe you’ll squeeze some mustard and call it good. Maybe you like some salad in the mix. Lettuce, tomato, onions, you people are all the same. I know you’re thinking about bacon. You think I don’t know where you’re planning to put those crispy strips? All the same, I tell you.

What if there were another way? What if you gave the usual condiments the day off? What if you left the salad for the bunnies? Do this for me. Toast that bun. Not too much, just crispy not crunchy. Now grab the butter. Do you trust me or not? Slather the bun. Don’t spread it, slather it! Now find your garlic powder in the cupboard. Yes, garlic salt is fine. Shake it on both bun halves. More. Don’t be stingy with the garlic. Now put the delicious patty between those two buns. Yes you will, we’ve come too far to go back now. What do you mean, what else? That’s it, bun, butter, garlic, patty, done. You’re welcome.

It was a cool autumn day in the early ‘90s when we discovered the garlic bread burger. We didn’t call it that at the time. In fact, it wasn’t until I was describing it to a friend at work a few months ago that it dawned on me. Why, that’s just a burger with garlic bread for buns. Clearly I’m a little slow on the uptake.

The reason I’m most grateful for garlic bread is it’s accessibility. If you’re having a bread-in-hand kind of meal and you’ve poorly planned then there’s hope where there’s garlic. You’re going to be hard pressed to whip up a mess of biscuits before the pasta cools. You don’t even have the pan seasoned right for cornbread. Does anyone actually know how to make yeast rolls? I think there’s a special machine. Short of pulling a fistful of 7-grain from the sack (which I’ve seen done) you’re going breadless. But not if you've got garlic and butter, my friend.

Imagine the gulf between the expert and the novice. Your home-made lasagna is barely Stouffer's, so how would it ever pass muster at a restaurant with no crayons on the table? But your made-in-your-robe garlic bread could compete in the finest haute cuisine ristorante.

My favorite, for sentimental reasons, is the long, frozen loaf sold in the cooking foil. It has center pieces that are like sponge cake and ends that will require a dunk in the gravy just to make chewable. C'est magnifique! I can live peaceably with the the garlic sticks and knots. I understand the pressures of marketplace and fashion, but thanks for staying the course. My utmost respect goes to the garlic toast. Wherever there is even a rudimentarily provisioned kitchen, there awaits garlic toast. Nothing could be easier and nothing more delicious. We could all learn a lot from a slice of garlic toast.

This idea is based on the book 14,000 things to be happy about by Barbara Ann Kipfer

Nonconsecutive Gratitude - The Prospect of Learning*

What CAN'T Jeremy Be Grateful For?

On Tuesdays and Thursdays we're gonna answer the question, "How in the world can Jeremy be grateful for _______?" The blank is up to you to fill. Leave your suggestions in the comments below or find me on Instagram @nonconsecutive

There’s a certain feeling that I’ve felt. It’s anticipation ringed with curiosity. It’s very close to the sensation of holding a gift that you’re just about to unwrap. It’s the brink of discovery. There comes a new electricity to the brain and a liveliness to the fingers. The brain may be grappling with the presents possibilities while the fingers pry around the edges of the wrap. It’s the feeling of the lecture hall when the mind is pondering potentials and the hand steadies the pen for the note paper. It’s the hum of the church auditorium when the soul leans-in and the thumb presses the Bible’s pages. You’re about to know something that you didn’t know.

These are the immediate examples, and they are lodged in so many crannies of life. It’s what keeps us turning the pages of a novel. It’s what makes us start the next episode when we’re already up past bedtime. It’s the taste of the new recipe when it’s still a little too hot. It’s walking up to the door for a party when you’ve never been to the house before. It’s a blind date, a how-to video, a letter with a hand-written envelope, and the first day of school. You’re about to find out something that has been essentially a secret.

There’s a slower moving and more nebulous variant. It’s how you know that you’ll get better at billiards if you keep playing. It’s buying a used boat and knowing that you’ll figure out it’s idiosyncrasies. It’s learning the vocabulary and conjugation of a foreign language with the potential to someday be fluent. It’s planting a tree, or planning a vacation, or following a new Instagram account, or buying the cookbook that will eventually lead to the aforementioned singed lips. You’re embarking on a journey that will lead to a revelation.

My wife and I decided to adopt a baby a few years ago. Once the die was cast there was no possibility in our minds of relenting. We didn’t know how long the journey would last or who was waiting for us at the end. We nervously fluttered on the backs of butterflies and we dreamily soared on the wings of eagles. We knew everything we wanted and nothing of what would be. Having agreed to take on a difficult-to-place baby, we had more specifics than one might with a pregnancy. This only provided us more fodder for particular hopes and intentions.

Then the day came. We walked hand in hand up the sidewalk to the agency’s front door. We waited breathlessly on the sofa in the lobby. We walked toward the room with our hearts pounding in our ears. What would we see when we saw him for the first time? And then in an instant the prospect of learning all of these things became the actual knowledge of a tiny beautiful angel. I’m so thankful for the journey of discovery that began and I still have so much curiosity about where we’ll go from here. We live and we learn.

This idea is based on the book 14,000 things to be happy about by Barbara Ann Kipfer

Nonconsecutive Gratitude - Mowing the Grass*

What CAN'T Jeremy Be Grateful For?

On Tuesdays and Thursdays we're gonna answer the question, "How in the world can Jeremy be grateful for _______?" The blank is up to you to fill. Leave your suggestions in the comments below or find me on Instagram @nonconsecutive

Upon having a son some men rush to the sporting goods store for a mitt. Others purchase the junior-sized fishing pole and still others open a 529 college savings plan. I suppose all fathers have ambitions for their sons. Mine is getting the grass mowed. I don’t want to set the bar too high for the boy. It’s self-serving you say? What do you think, those other guys are playing baseball and fishing out of a sense of moral duty? Well, the 529 guy maybe.

Anyhow, we need to go back a ways. When I was getting on towards middle school, my family moved into a house with a half-acre yard. The mowing of this large yard would be my charge. It was essentially flat and basically square and completely fenced-in. The soil was rich and the grass was caterpillar. And the growing season felt like it was eleven and a half months of the year.

When I initially assumed my duties, the lawn tool I received was a self-propelled push mower. The bulky self-propelling mechanism on top of the machine didn’t actually work, but its added weight did make turning around at the end of each row more difficult. I grew strong of back and numb of hand mowing those heavy rows every Saturday. We acquired a rider by and by. It had a wide deck and a strong engine and, owing to some sort of collision, only turned left. It wouldn’t so much as veer to the right, but it was the industry’s first zero-turn left-hand mower. The battle was no less hard, but it had gone from infantry to strategy. Failure to plan would mean being stuck in a corner or having to double back on a row. Since I had very many much better things to be doing on Saturday there was no time to waste on re-work, and I became painstakingly tactical.

Years later I would move north and buy a house of my own with a half-acre yard. It was almost exactly the same except without the fence and with some sort of poison exuding from the soil. Whether it was a change in me or the change of locale I cannot say, but one thing was sure, I was suddenly and alarmingly allergic to grass. After a session of mowing it was like someone had taken a rubber mallet and beaten fiberglass insulation into all of my head holes. And I would be down for 20 hours at a clip.

So how can I be grateful for mowing the grass? Because it’s past tense. I’ve got some people in my life who show me great kindness lawn-wise. I hide inside, not even going near the doors or windows while I hear the mower running. As for my son, he will never feel the crushing pressure from his old man to achieve on the ball field. He will never get dragged out of bed while the stars are still twinkling to go shiver in a rowboat. And he will surely never have a funded 529 plan. My sole ambition for him is to get out there and get that grass knocked down.

Suggested by Jane LaTour

Nonconsecutive Gratitude - Gold Teeth*

What CAN'T Jeremy Be Grateful For?

On Tuesdays and Thursdays we're gonna answer the question, "How in the world can Jeremy be grateful for _______?" The blank is up to you to fill. Leave your suggestions in the comments below or find me on Instagram @nonconsecutive

Maybe it’s a generational thing, but my most immediate association of a gold tooth is Joe Pesci in Home Alone. I love the way the fabulous director, John Hughes, had light glint off of the tooth when Joe was in the cop uniform and smiling at Kevin. You’ve got to love the panicked way Pesci realizes it’s missing later. And how can you not love the way the beautiful Katherine O’Hara finds the tooth and visibly ponders what exactly she has found?

Do old school gold fronts count in the same way as Pesci’s tooth? You know fronts, AKA grills, those clip in tooth covers for adding bling and swag to your smile? I knew a guy once that bought some 14k fronts on a whim. I mean, how many among us have not heard the siren song of amateur cosmetic dentistry? He said that they fit in a technical sense, but that they became exceedingly uncomfortable after a few minutes. Imagine that. Certain hip-hop notables have gone around the bend with the gold teeth and are now sporting diamond encrustations. Braces caused my middle-school friends to have abrasions on their inner lips. What must princess cut stones do?

I might hazard a guess that at some point in dentistry’s past there was a more (legitimate) reason for gold in the mouth. Before it gave you street cred it gave you hygienic fillings. It sounds a little scammy, I know.

“So doc, ya say I’ve got holes in my teeth? What in the world can ya fill them holes with do ya reckon?”

“Uh, well . . . I’m not exactly . . . GOLD! Yeah, gold is uh . . . safer and . . . so forth.”

It probably didn’t go down like that. There was probably some trial and error. Maybe even some deliberation. Perhaps a scholarly paper in a peer-reviewed journal of dentistry. The Benefits of Gold as an Elemental Filling and Coating for Cavities and Replacement: All That Glitters is Not Molar.

I’m not trying to blow my own whistle here, but I only have one filling. I’m a man of a certain age, and I’ve only had the need to have addressed one tiny pinhole in a noncritical tooth. I actually don’t know what tooth it’s in. My tooth health is so primo that I can’t even specify the one incisor that had the lone issue of my oral history. I’m grateful for a mouth devoid of decay. But I’m not sure the congratulations should go to my brushing technique. And I know that it can’t be the flossing. Because other than at the dentist and in the terrified 24 hours immediately following a visit, I have not flossed. I don’t gargle. I don’t mouthwash. You hate me, don’t you.

I’m of the opinion that tooth health has a huge genetic component. Some folks just have tooth enamel that’s harder than trigonometry. Some people have some baller enzyme action preventing the sugar bugs from wreaking their havoc. I don’t know what my dental advantage is, but I sure am grateful for it.