GEORGE ARCHIBALD

THANKSGIVING 2007

Thanksgiving Day, November 22, 2007. A great and lovely day.

Daughter Elizabeth, 19, a freshman equestrian team blue-ribbon champion already at Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia, came with grandfather D.R. Smithson and my ex-wife’s nice current husband Larry Belkin to pick up the Rusty-mobile, a 1991 Honda CRX that my mother drove until she died a year ago.

Elizabeth, my youngest of four daughters, needed a car and it made sense to give her the Rusty-mobile, so they came to pick it up and drove off. What a lovely Thanksgiving. Lizza will get lessons to drive the four-speed shift before she heads back to university. She’s a good driver and cool-headed, so there should be no problem.

Then my friend John Mullaney and I drove to the Blackthorne Inn near Upperville for Thanksgiving dinner. It was a marvelous three-course meal with dessert in the middle of nowhere between Middleburg and Winchester, Virginia, with trees changing colour along the Blue Ridge Mountains at the height of autumn.

What a way to spend Thanksgiving. An altogether delightful day, capped by a PBS television special with violinist Pinchas Zukerman playing composer Max Bruch’s lovely first violin concerto in G-minor, completed and first performed in 1866 by Otto von Königslow with Bruch himself conducting.

I personally prefer Joshua Bell’s version, a tour-de-force with conductor Neville Marriner and Academy of Saint Martin in the Fields on a 1988 London Decca label. It’s glorious music. Rolling drums and glorious violins, cellos, horns. Both Zukerman’s and Bell’s performances are magnificent.

Now a few other comments and observations:

I was privileged to be married to a lovely woman for eighteen years who birthed and mothered my four lovely daughters. She left me ten years ago, and it was a difficult divorce, but as time has passed I have come to realize that I was wrong in many ways for most often putting work first. Family suffered. I was not there many times when I was needed. It’s tough juggling all the balls that are always in the air. Not to make excuses, but it’s true for many families. It’s tough to do everything that’s required and that people want.

But Blair did a wonderful job raising our girls as their mother, and part of my thanks to God today is that I have a good relationship with all four daughters in the sense that we respect and love each other for who we are and the values we share and cherish, and they know I'm always there for them, as they are for me.

Also our entire family has always been there to support and nurture the children, and to provide what they need.

To see Lizza drive off today in the Rusty-mobile was the best Thanksgiving gift a dad could ever have, to see the happiness in her face, and to have ex-father-in-law D.R. Smithson and Blair’s husband Larry Belkin there to help make it happen.

It was a wonderful Thanksgiving day, and my heart was healed as they drove off and I realized we have survived a long ordeal but still love and support each other.

KAREN

I took a lady to dinner and she complained that I did not go out on the restaurant patio with her afterwards in the cold while she sat there for 40 minutes smoking cigarettes with other men who smoke.

The lady called me rude. She emailed me and called me a liar because I had allowed her to smoke in my house. Some people do not understand tolerance, kindness, and hospitality by others but are ungrateful and abusive. We shall not see each other again.

I don't like smoking. I'm allergic to cigarette smoke, although I was tolerant and let the lady smoke in my house, which was my mother’s house, who died of lung cancer after smoking for 60 years.

So rude I am not. Liar I am not. Kind and hospitable I am.

Rude is my lady friend for not allowing a person who does not like cigarette smoke to stay away from it. I don't like sitting out in the cold 40-degree nighttime weather and having cigarette smoke all around just because a smoking addict wants me to.

Why are addicted cigarette smokers so intolerant that they assume they can inflict their smoke on anyone they want –- and that non-smokers have to tolerate them blowing their smoke in everybody's face as they fulfill their addiction and fill their lungs with nicotine?

Let them sit outside, stand outside, pollute the air along with old cars and utility smokestacks.

But stay out of my face. And don’t call me rude and a liar after I hosted you for a nice dinner and wine. You addicts to nicotine are the rude ones. You impose your pollution on those of us who get sick from cigarette smoke.

I spent a career as a newspaperman in a newsroom filled with cigarette smoke and my hero was Carol Innerst when she launched a revolving fan on her desktop in the newsroom to blow away the cigarette smoke.

For the smokers, it was downhill from there. Carol Innerst launched a revolution at The Washington Times that made a difference. God bless her. They ultimately all had to go outside to smoke. We non-smokers all benefitted.

So smokers can go outside. Restaurants and bars everywhere are banning cigarette smoking. Thank you very much. Make the cigarette smokers go out in the cold until the government regulators ban them outside as well as polluters.

And unkind, ungrateful, rude and insulting Karen can take a hike and be with unkind, ungrateful and insulting cigarette-smoking users of her ilk. Who needs such common, nasty people? Let them make themselves unhappy, not the rest of us.