Flipping grateful even for a bad year

Susan Swartz
Asked by a reporter how she felt about being in her stage of
life — age 60 — Meryl Streep told Vanity Fair magazine that she was
very flipping “grateful to be alive.” Actually she used a word more
adamant than “flipping” that would be more in the character of
Jane, her randy character in “It’s Complicated” than her iron-faced
nun in “Doubt.”
You could say that if you were the Marvelous Meryl you’d be
grateful for what you have, too. Continued amazing career, nice
family, no worries about the mortgage, great skin.
But there’s something more basic to her gratitude. She explains,
“I have so many friends who are sick or gone, and I’m here. Are you
kidding? No complaints.”
I mentioned Meryl’s comments to a friend when we met for an
end-of-year drink. For her 2009 was more memorably bad than good.
She was beat up in a brutal sexual attack one morning when she was
working alone in her office.
She said she fought and punched and bit her attacker to stay
alive for her grandson. She couldn’t bear for him to lose one more
important person in his life. She has a couple of scabs on her face
but she still laughs like no one else and is determined to not let
the assault get in the way of her freedom. She wears a whistle
around her neck and has given them to some of her colleagues, but
she continues to walk where she pleases, night and day. And on New
Year’s Eve she would party like always, banging pots and pans in
the street and drinking champagne.
Then we talked about our usual things — books, movies and mutual
pals — and I toasted her fierce spirit and convincing scream and we
drank to being alive.
Over Christmas we got a unique holiday greeting from a designer
friend whose teenage son had some scary surgery at the end of the
year to correct scoliosis. The card shows two different X-ray
images and is as startling as Frida Kahlo’s painting of her torso
sliced in half. The first picture is the young man’s spine yanked
to the left and pushed to the right. To further the image there’s a
photo of a tangled spaghetti pile of Christmas tree lights. Also
pictured is the good news X-ray of a spine notched with pins and
staples, but straight. Next to it is a photo of a simple single
string of holiday lights. The card’s message reads: “Gratitude,
2009.”
There are probably endless reasons to be flipping grateful even
in our world of wars and lost jobs and foreclosed houses and
uncertain health insurance and dread of the next guy getting on a
plane who knows how to work his bomb. You could spend all your time
thinking only about the bad stuff. But I believe in taking
inspiration from wherever it comes and the other night on
Masterpiece Theatre a dying woman told her young friend that worry
is a waste of time.
For more reassurance I suggest a trip to the Morrison
Planetarium exhibit at the California Academy of Sciences. Sit in
the dark and fly through space and you might take comfort that the
sky really isn’t falling, although it does seem to burn up a lot
with all those dying stars and new ones coming along. By comparison
human beings are very tiny and somewhat insignificant. But we’re
still here and for that we might as well be grateful.
Susan Swartz is an author and local journalist. You can also
read her at www.juicytomatoes.com and hear
her Another Voice commentary on KRCB-FM radio on Fridays. Email is
su***@ju***********.com.