It’s Thanksgiving Sunday, God. Time for You and me to have our annual chat.
Time, once again, to count my blessings — and jealously compare the totals to those of my neighbours. Frankly, God, I’m a little disappointed in the results.
Granted, it takes a bit of effort to find grounds for resentment in a nation as blessed as this.
The United Nations’s World Happiness Report, which measures the well-being of 156 countries using indicators such as healthy life expectancy, social supports and freedom from corruption, ranks Canada sixth overall, trailing Denmark, Norway, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Sweden.
Britain’s Legatum Institute places us third — behind Norway and Sweden — on its Prosperity Index, which uses measures such as health, personal freedom, education, safety and security.
Even by Canadians standards I am well off: We live in a province so affluent that it has more registered motor vehicles (3.4 million) than licensed drivers (3.1 million) and in a city that Condé Nast Traveller magazine rated the 17th best in the whole wide world.
This is not Liberia, where Ebola is a reality, as opposed to an hysterical overreaction. It is not Syria, from which 2.5 million refugees have fled. Stephen Harper is not Kim Jong Un (yet).
But all this we assume as our birthright, God, befitting a people whose popular image of You roughly matches that of Santa Claus.
As a middle-aged Canadian man like myself, You realize there are certain standard benefits to which I am inherently entitled: a full fridge, clean water, dirty hockey, single malt scotch, double Air Miles, Netflix, on-time newspaper delivery, a dog that eats better than most Third World doctors, at least twice as much roof over my head as I really need, and an iPhone 7, because I deserve the best, even when it does not yet exist.
Alas, lately I have detected a little slippage, Lord. Airlines are charging for checked luggage. They spelled my name wrong at Starbucks. Nigerian scammers keep slipping through my email filter. My new car has a bluetooth device that will speak to me only in French, much like Pauline Marois (though it is thankfully silent on the subject of religious headgear). To be blunt, God, I expect better.
Still, mustn’t grumble. Best to show my magnanimous side and list those things for which I am grateful:
I am thankful for Thanksgiving dinner with dark turkey meat, heaps of fat-soaked stuffing, mountains of buttered mashed potatoes and rivers of rich, brown gravy, followed by a great slab of pie, smothered in ice cream.
I am thankful for our excellent cardiologists.
I am grateful for the massive menu of possibilities facing Greater Victoria voters, who will get to choose from 241 candidates for 124 positions on 13 councils and three school boards next month. Shouldn’t be hard to sort through that crowd at all.
I am thankful that I am not the Halifax, Nova Scotia, receptionist who must now answer the phone using the full name of the Immigrant Settlement & Integration Services agency, instead of the usual “ISIS, may I help you?”
I am thankful that Canadians hold scientists in such high esteem that our government is afraid to let them open their mouths.
I am grateful to learn that Sarah Palin’s family got in a wild drunken brawl in their hometown in Alaska, as their behaviour makes me feel better about my own. Wish I had been the one to dub the fight “The Thrilla in Wasilla” though.
I am grateful that an intermittent split-second shriek reminds me when the batteries are low in my smoke detectors, particularly the forgotten one way up in the hardest-to-reach part of the vaulted ceiling.
I am grateful that even last night, when I desperately needed to sleep, the split-second shriek was loud enough to jar me awake at 4:23 a.m., then keep me awake by going off at one-minute intervals.
I am grateful that the police respond so quickly to reports of rifle fire in my neighbourhood, even at 4:31 a.m., though I wish they would be more understanding when you explain that the smoke detector “really had to die.”
And, as always, I am grateful for my sense of entitlement, without which I would have no sense at all.
