Editor’s Note, Winter 2001

Thanksgiving is the best—nondenominational, noncommercial, multicultural, turkey is good for you, cranberries are the elite of New England, the weekend is usefully long, long enough, for example, to go visit family. Plus, it was invented by an American.

And, as my mother used to say, even when it didn’t seem especially true, we all have a lot to be thankful for.

We need Thanksgiving because gratitude is not easy to express. Only a few people get Oscars and a chance to thank their high-school drama teachers. Most of us never get a public thanking occasion, so a national holiday devoted to the subject only begins to help us pay down our debt.

Conversely, it is discomfiting to be thanked. No one’s more annoying than an effusive thanker. As egalitarians, we’ve shucked noblesse oblige—we don’t like being obligated, down or up.

Sometime when I wasn’t looking, saying “you’re welcome” gave way to “no problem.” I have a problem with that, because it sounds like a bad translation from one of those languages in which you parry “thank you” with “please.” If you’re going to turn good manners into table tennis, consider the Marx Bros. monomaniacal riff: Thank you. Thank You! Thank YOU. THANK YOU.

There are lots of people who have never been sufficiently thanked for their help with ZYZZYVA. There was a guy at the original office of Good Vibrations, just down the corridor from our designer, who let me use his postage meter one day to backdate a postmark so I could make the deadline of a crucial grant application. That little illegality saved our bacon. And I’m relieved I can now confess—and say thanks into the ether.

I’m more concerned with all those I’ve thanked, but not enough. Not that I tried to get away with a form letter, but that I didn’t force people to understand how wonderful, how crucial their help had been. The appearance out of the blue. In the nick of time.

When I was a kid wanting to earn some money, a friend of my mother’s used to hire me to wax her floors. That seemed funny, because her floors were never scuffed or dull. Only a little while ago did I realize she was making work for me. So I thank her now, and all the rest of you who have conspired to help me here at ZYZZYVA, often without my being aware of your kindness.