Happy Thanksgiving! I’ve got plenty to be thankful for.

This is my favorite holiday because it reminds us to take stock of all the good things in our lives…and I’ve got plenty to be thankful for.

The last almost three years have been difficult: COVID, lockdowns, vaccines, corrupt elections, Biden entering the White House, the Afghanistan fiasco, the broken border, the Ukraine fiasco, inflation, the 2022 midterm with its further revelations about RINO treason, and just about every Biden policy and the dangerous fallout from those policies. And yet, sitting here on November 24, 2022, I have a lot of blessings to count.

I’ve long been a blessing counter. During a bad time in my life, I took Irving Berlin’s advice:

That’s what I do every day: Count my blessings. And if I ignore what’s going on at the national level, this Thanksgiving I find that I am singularly blessed.

Thanks to having children and some hard work on my part, I am a better person than I’ve ever been at any other time in my life. I don’t know how I stack up compared to other people, but compared to the me of the first half of my life, I come out a winner. I can still be vicious, but I’ve learned to take that out on the political world and not on the people near me.

Speaking of my children, I never tried to raise mine to set the world on fire. What I wanted for them was to be healthy, intelligent, hard-working, and capable of making good decisions. I wanted to like them, and I hoped they would like me. And I got all of that! Talk about a blessing.

I share my life with a man who makes me happy every single day. We are very alike in core ways that matter, and completely different in the ways that make life fun, funny, interesting, and endlessly enjoyable. I never saw this coming, and I’m incredibly grateful.

I am surrounded by wonderful people, both in the physical world and in the cyberworld. Family, friends, neighbors, and all of you, my Bookworm friends, make my world a better place every day.

After slogging through 30 years as a lawyer, a job I hated, I now work full-time as an editor and political commentator — it’s my dream job, and I get paid for it! How great is that? My apprenticeship was long and slow (slowly becoming conservative, learning how to write persuasively, practicing at my beloved Bookworm Room) but the payoff was incredible.

My dog thrives. He’s 13, so he ought to be entering a period of decline, but he’s not. Those chihuahua genes really make a difference, and I cherish every day I have this foolish, loving, utterly endearing little guy in my life.

My health is pretty darn good. I miss being able to do martial arts (arthritis), and I have a few little things here and there, but mostly I anticipate living to see my grandchildren get born and, if I’m very lucky and stay away from too much chocolate, start the process of growing up.

And so, as Irving Berlin knew (given that he’d been born a Jew in tsarist Russia, ended up in NY’s unutterably squalid Lower East Side, left school at 13 to work as a singing waiter in a filthy and violent bar, and went on to become one of America’s most famous men), I’ve got plenty to be thankful for.

I hope you all have something to be thankful for, too, and please feel free to share it here.