Reasons To Be Thankful

Thanksgiving is upon us, and this time of year we all have many things to be thankful for: the sound the cranberry sauce cylinder makes as it blorps out of the can; sitting in a dazed stupor in front of the Detroit Lions as your body struggles to process the food cataclysm you hath just wrought upon it; a pre-dawn fistfight with other shoppers over the last $3 curling iron….  Good times.  But since many of us are so abundantly blessed that we have trouble keeping track of everything we should be grateful for, let’s consult  Duke Digital Collections for reminders of reasons we should give thanks.

Be thankful … for consumer electronics. Finally, Dad got the hint and got us that Pentron tape recorder we’ve been Tweeting, Facebooking, texting, graffitiing the bathroom walls, and whining around the dinner table about! It’s just what we need to record the sounds of Little Susie stomping on his feet and holding his arms while Big Sister (or Mom or Crazed Neighbor or whoever that is) chokes him from behind.  Family togetherness!

Be thankful … your name isn’t Mallory Elkonite. Oh, that’s not the woman in the apron’s name?  Okay, then be thankful you have a handy switch in your kitchen that operates the Grand Coulee Dam, like not-Mallory does.  No more trudging out into the desert to open the floodgates!  And now that we think about it, “Mallory Elkonite” would be an awesome name for a character on a soap, or maybe a sexy spy.

Be thankful … you can travel in style with your typewriter, pipe, and stripey pajamas. Except it will cost you $25 to check your pajamas, and you have to be able to fit the typewriter under the seat in front of you, and don’t even think about tampering with, disabling, or destroying the lavatory smoke detector so you can light up that pipe.  (Perhaps you were expecting some kind of airport-security–related joke here.  We try not to go for cheap laughs here at Duke Digital Collections.  We try to go for free laughs, because we have $0 in our comedy budget.  Obviously.)

Be thankful … your hands are as soft as a velvet child, even on wash day. “My hands used to be so rough and brittle that I couldn’t even play the piano!  My husband and I had nothing to do but discuss my hair-do and perfume until, mercifully, it was our 8 o’clock bedtime.  Golly, I sure hope they invent TV soon!”

Be thankful … you can now watch the Slack-Jawed Gawking Channel in crystal clarity. Thanks to the Mallory Inductuner, your TV is more inductunicated than ever.  In fact, non-inductunification is down over 80 percent since last Thanksgiving.  What an age we live in!

Most of all, take a moment — or two — to be seriously thankful for some serious stuff, for real.  Friends, family, your health, your pets, your Snuggie, whatever you have that brings you joy.  And, you know, if you want to show some gratitude for Duke Digital Collections, that would be cool, too.  We wear a size Large, green goes with our eyes, and our birthstone is diamond.  Just puttin’ it out there.