How Can You Not Feel Thankful?

Happy Thanksgiving, everybody. I just spatchcocked the turkey and put it into the smoker. This is my annual job, and it is utterly remarkable how little I remember about it from year to year. That is to say that EVERY SINGLE YEAR I have to go to the internet to learn how to spatchcock a turkey, how long to smoke the turkey, how to prepare the turkey, and all the rest. I’m like a Thanksgiving goldfish.

But the turkey is in the smoker, and it’s a brisk November morning, and we have fudge in our refrigerator for some reason, and the Blue Jays just made a big play for Dylan Cease, and last night we went to see Zootopia 2, and I sat next to a little girl, maybe 6 or 7, who danced the entire movie.

I mean, how can you not feel thankful?

Ohio State plays Michigan in two days, and it matters to me for the 59th straight year because I still loathe Michigan. I have lost almost all my appetite for college football. I no longer even care about Ohio State. It isn’t anything specific — I just find the new college football dizzying and baffling, not unlike cryptocurrency. I moved away from the game, found other things I care about more on Saturdays. But loathing Michigan — that’s just a part of my Ohio childhood that never goes away, and I love that I still feel strongly.

I mean, how can you not feel thankful?

Our younger daughter, Katie, just went to Italy, and she sent us a photo of herself holding up the Leaning Tower of Pisa. How many millions of people through the years have taken that exact photograph? And it occurred to me: Can you imagine how the architect of the Leaning Tower of Pisa must feel about having his shoddy work mocked for ALMOST ONE THOUSAND YEARS? This would be like if they had made a monument celebrating Pete Carroll’s Super Bowl coaching, and for the next thousand years, people took a photo of themselves by it, laughing and throwing imaginary interceptions.

Anyway, here’s the photo:

How can you not feel thankful?

There’s a stack of 6,000 or so pieces of paper on our living room table — I have to sign all of them in the next couple of weeks, and then sign 5,000 more that will arrive later. These are called tip sheets — they will be inserted into the book Big Fan that Mike Schur and I wrote. The book comes out on May 19, and we both have to sign all the tip sheets in time for pub day. In addition to just signing the sheets, we are also doing fun limited-editions that you just might get if you preorder the book from our good friends at Joseph-Beth Booksellers.

For example, we’ll have the “Q for Mike Limited Edition” set of 50. Here are just a couple. I’m trying to come up with some doozy questions for Mike.

Anyway, I spend a couple of hours every day just sitting at that table, signing tip sheets, trying to figure out how in the world I ended up in this life.

“What’s your Dad doing?” our older daughter Elizabeth’s boyfriend asked.

“Oh, he’s just signing thousands of sheets for his new book,” she said.

I mean, how can you not feel thankful?

Christmas decorations are out already, and this is supposed to be an annual gripe — geez, can’t we just wait for Thanksgiving to be over BEFORE we put out the holiday lights? — but I feel differently about it this year. Everything feels so dark. I don’t just mean that figuratively; I mean it feels like night is getting darker. Daylight savings time this year seemed to turn out the lights even earlier than usual. Seeing bright and happy lights cut through the blackness even before Thanksgiving feels … hopeful, somehow.

I mean, how can you not feel thankful?

We live in a time of statistical wonders. I mean …

And …

And …

And …

And …

How can you not feel thankful?

The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade is on television now. If we were starting the world over again, how long would it be until someone came up with the idea of the Macy’s Day Parade? How long would it take before someone said, “You know what, we should do a cartoon about a square sea sponge who wears correctly shaped pants and works as a fry cook, and then we should create a gigantic inflatable of him and have it float about the city while dancers in super bright yellow outfits march and perform underneath?”

I hear every single day from someone who says that I inspired them.

I don’t know exactly what to do with that information other than to say …

How can you not feel thankful?

I constantly say “Google” wrong. I know it’s GOO-gle — with an emphasis on the GOO — so that it rhymes more or less with frugal. But I find myself using what linguists call the /ʊ/ vowel sound, like in “book.” I pronounce “kugel” that way, too. I don’t mean to do it, and I’m always a little bit embarrassed when I do, but at some point, we are who we are, I guess.

Spider-Man just floated down Sixth Avenue. If we started the world over again, how long would it be before someone came up with Spider-Man?

Debbie Gibson just sang. Debbie Gibson! Holy cow. She looks great. “Only in My Dreams!”

The Colorado Rockies just named Warren Schaeffer as their full-time manager, and I’ve decided that I will now dedicate a fair amount of my time and baseball brain space to rooting for him to succeed as the Rockies’ manager. I will do this for multiple reasons.

Point is, Warren, I’m with you! Let’s turn this thing around!

You learn so much watching the Macy’s Day Parade. I just saw a singer wearing feathers (the sound is muted). I learned his nam is Conan Gray, which led me to learning about a music genre called “bedroom pop,” which led me to learn about a singer named Clairo who is also known as DJ Baby Benz, which led to me learn that the most famous Baby Benz is the 1980s era Mercedes-Benz W201, which led me to learn that 201 is an area code in New Jersey (I knew that), slan for a jail in Memphis (referred to often in rap songs), the multiple of two prime numbers (3 × 67) and, the win total of two pitchers — Hall of Famer Rube Marquard and non-Hall of Famer Charlie Root.

Elizabeth just came over to the house and, for reasons that I cannot even recount, made me search “tennis bedazzled Labubu." This is what came up:

Naomi Osaka named her Labubu “Billie Jean Bling,” which is pretty much the greatest thing I’ve ever heard.

I am now in the market for a tennis-bedazzled Labubu that I will call “Novak Glowkovic.”

Can you believe writing this stuff is my job?

My wife Margo has this superpower: She can recognize voices after only a few words. She will listen to a commercial and go, “Oh, that’s Jon Hamm.” She will hear a narrator speak and go, “Hey, that’s Glenn Close.” We have been watching the Ken Burns Revolutionary War documentary, and probably 30 times so far she has paused the doctumentary to say, “Oh, that’s your friend Tom Hanks,” or “That’s Meryl Streep,” or “Paul Giamatti.”

Only she never says it like that. She will say, “Oh, you know who that is?” And I will go, “No.”

And she will say, “Yes, you do, you know that voice,” and she will sound so excited, and she will look at me expectedly, even though we have been married for more than 25 years and I have never once gotten a voice right (other than Morgan Freeman).

How can you not feel thankful?

Actually, I should stop for a moment. A lot of people have a hard time feeling thankful. They have a hard time seeing through the darkness. I wrote briefly a couple of weeks ago about my friend Daniel Naroditsky. He was one of the best chess players in the world — particularly in shorter timed games — and also one of the great chess teachers. He loved chess dearly, loved it as much as anyone can love anything.

Not so long ago, a former world chess champion named Vladimir Kramnik accused him of cheating. This, apparently, is Kramnik’s thing. He goes around these days accusing people of cheating. He’s kind of chess’ Jose Canseco but more vicious. He has accused many, including the best American player, Hikaru Nakamura. Most of the great players have been able to shake off his nonsense and accept that Kramnik has become relentlessly vindictive in his later years.

Daniel could not let go. He felt a deep respect for chess — Kramnik had been a hero — and a deep pride in his own efforts to become a great player. He had to prove his innocence — he just had to — again and again and again. Friends pleaded with him to ignore the lies, to remember how loved he was, to lift him up.

He simply could not find the light. At one point, he surrounded himself with SEVEN cameras to prove that he wasn’t cheating. But it is impossible to prove a negative, especially with people who are not interested in what is true, and he grew more and more desperate. He put immense, overwhelming pressure on himself to perform at his very best every single day so that he would be above suspicion. He died a little more than a month ago at age 29.

I bring this up now because Daniel’s friends at the Charlotte Chess Center are raising money for a Daniel Naroditsky Fund, to keep his memory alive, to help young chess players reach their potential in his name, and, most of all, I think, to make some good out of something so terrible. If you have a couple of bucks to spare …

And this is what I’m most thankful for — the people who push through the gloom, who fight back from the edge, who overcome sorrow and tragedy and hard luck and still find a way to pump goodness into this world. Thank you.

Also, Darlene Love just sang about Christmas at the Macy’s Day Parade.

How can you not feel thankful?