Thank you. No, no, thank YOU

I got a great thank you note the other day, the kind that makes you want to send a thank you for the thank you. It was short, elegant, sweet but not sentimental. It gave me a kind of rush. Perhaps that is why I am now about six days overdue in sending a thank you note to my weekend hosts. I want to send the very best thank you because it was a very good weekend.

We were out in the countryside of Western Connecticut. Wide open fields of mown hay and woods lay all around the house, while we cooked and ate and drank and talked and laughed and ate some more. At dawn both mornings I went jogging down the two lane road, hooting a halloo at the gaping milk cows and listening to the songs of the early birds. I don’t know how the owners, who were not with us, get any work done. I spent hours on the porch looking at the yellow-headed birds and the clouds and trying to see if those deer in the distance were bucks or does. It gave me a very odd, very simple, pleasure to catch sight of a jet making a contrail and to sit and do nothing but watch it draw the single line across the sky. When one made a little turn to the West, just a little turn, I was so startled I almost dropped my buttered bagel.

So ‘thank you very much for inviting us’ doesn’t seem to fit the situation fully enough, yet I did like the simplicity of the note I got. (Sigh) Maybe tomorrow.

Meanswhile, I read where Bremer said that the one thing George wanted to get from the Iraqis was some kind of token of appreciation for all he had done for the country, a kind of national thank you for coming over note. I am pretty sure my hosts will get theirs before he gets his.