The history of the celebration of Thanksgiving goes back to 1621. However only in 1863, in the midst of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a national Thanksgiving Day to be held each November. We usually associate the holiday with family gatherings to share the turkey dinner and the Black Friday shopping the next day. Years ago, I specially visited downtown to photograph the shoulder to shoulder crowds in front of the Macy’s store. I did not go there this year, but I suspect today there are no crowds. And I think that some families are concerned to get together for the celebration, because of the Coronavirus. Then what is left from the holiday? I believe what started it in the first place, the attitude of gratitude. When I Googled the phrase, I found an article which appeared on May 10, 2019 at goodjobpal.com titled, “Why attitude of gratitude makes you happier and the science behind it.” In the article it was defined as: “An attitude of gratitude means making it a habit to express thankfulness and appreciation in all parts of your life, on a regular basis, for both the big and small things alike.”

As a part of my expression of gratitude to you, I produced a new 2021 art calendar; a tradition I started last year. I am going to mail it to my clients for whom I helped to get mortgages in the last three years. I hope you are one of them. If I helped you before 2018, and you would like to get one (you can see the photo images at mannykagan.smugmug.com), please let me know, and I will gladly send you one, as long as supplies last.

In the last two weeks, I wrote about how to have a healthy body. This week, I want to bring your attention to the healthy mind. I am re-quoting Earl Nightingale, “We become what we think about most of the time.” But how do we know what to think about? We acquire our knowledge from various sources every moment we are awake, based on the foundation which we received from our parents the moment we were born, and later friends, teachers and books. But there is something else which might affect how we think or act and it seems we all inherited it from cavemen (or cavewomen). I learned about it in “I Done This Blog” by Black Thorne, posted on October 15, 2019. It starts by describing how a negative experience while driving to work can have a negative effect over the rest of the day. Turns out, we need to blame the caveman for that experience. Research shows that our brains evolved to react much more strongly to negative experiences than the positive ones. This reaction is supposed to protect us, better be safe than to be eaten by a tiger. But there are no hungry tigers, at least where we all are. Nevertheless, many of us prefer to be safe rather than sorry. It’s called the negative bias. According to research, our focus on the negative things is rooted in how our attention works.

As far as I am concerned, I decided to isolate myself from the sources of negative information. No more reading the news in the newspapers or listening to the Public Radio Forum. My rational is very simple, since I can do nothing to change external events, I will work on rewiring my brain to focus only on the positive information. To do this, I have to change old habits. 45 years ago, I decided to stop the habit of eating meat to become a vegetarian. 18 years ago, I changed the habit of drinking alcohol to keep a clear mind. Now my objective is to become a positive thinking person. It is a gradual process. To help, I came up with the sixth way to beat the negative bias; to laugh a lot and to entice others to laugh together with me. My next book “42 Encounters with Laughter” is going to be available on amazon.com before the holidays. Stay tuned. 

In my essay last week, I wrote about how fruits and vegetables can be a beneficial part of your diet and your well-being. Online I learned that one of them, the tomato, has an annual production of 60 million tons, 16 million more than the second most popular fruit, bananas; and apples are the third. The “Joy of Cooking” cookbook lists 64 tomato recipes.

An article written by K. Annabelle Smith, which was originally published in Smithsonian Magazine, with the intriguing title “Why the Tomato Was Feared in Europe for More Than 200 Years” got my attention.

Tomatoes originated in South and Central America at about 700 A.D., and have had a very interesting journey. They were brought to Europe after the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs Empire. In the article about tomatoes, I learned that while tomatoes are fruit that are botanically classified as berries, they are commonly used as vegetables. This is perhaps why in 1893, the U.S. Supreme Court overruled Mother Nature by declaring tomatoes were not fruits, but vegetables. 

Most of us are familiar with the processed fruit, which is harvested by machines while still green. Some producers even shape tomatoes in squares for more productive packaging. I personally prefer Heirloom Tomatoes, which I’ve purchased at farmers markets and in specialty stores. Smelling them brings back a memory of my childhood. When I was a teenager, a group of us broke into someone’s greenhouse and stole big ripe tomatoes that we then threw at each other. As a teenager, I also liked to drink tomato juice which was sold at local vegetable stores. The last time we used tomato juice was some years ago to give our corgi dog a bath, after he was sprayed by a skunk.

I paraphrased my title from a quote by Earl Nightingale, “We become what we think about most of the time, and that’s the strangest secret.”

Actually, those two statements are interconnected, and this is the strangest secret. A lot of people, even those who are on a diet, do not think about the real reasons why, they want to lose weight and often they gain it back. Many eat without thinking of what is going into their mouth, whether it’s eating for comfort or hunger.

We lived in Israel when I was 28. One day, my wife Elfa suggested that we should follow a vegetarian diet. At the beginning it was challenging, since while I was growing up in Riga, Latvia, I ate a lot of meat (my father managed a meat store). However, I was considering myself vegetarian, and only ate vegetable based food, and gradually my body and more importantly my brain adjusted. Later on, when we moved to San Francisco, we went to a nutritionist who advised us to add fish to our diet and so we began to follow a pescatarian diet. And again, our bodies and minds adjusted. Our experiment started forty-five years ago and we are still following this diet today. As a result, I am a healthy, energetic individual, who plans to keep serving others for many years to come. I believe, what I eat and my lifestyle will allow me to live until I am one hundred-and-twenty. And then I will make new plans.

When we grew up in Riga, Latvia, every autumn we would go to a local forest to pick mushrooms. So when I saw an article on October 1, 2020 in “The Wall Street Journal” titled, “Russia’s Love Affair With Fungi Has Mushroomed in Pandemic”, it brought back pleasant memories. I sometimes use the analogy of how to pick mushrooms with how to find clients. First of all, you need to know which mushrooms are edible and which can be poisonous (think about clients). Then you need to know where to find mushrooms. You can spend the whole day walking in the forest and only find the wrong ones.

It is a good idea to bring a backpack to keep an extra shirt, since the temperature can change, or if it rains, mosquito repellent is a must, and you also need an extra knife, water, snacks or sandwich and a compass. Nowadays, a mobile phone can serve many functions, if there is cell phone service. But finding mushrooms and bringing them home is only the beginning of the process of appreciation. They need to be cleaned (very dirty work), preserved and then cooked, dried or marinated. This last type is good with drinking Vodka, which is a Russian tradition. While describing how to pick the mushrooms, I realized that the method of processing mushrooms is similar to the processing of mortgage loans. Finding a client and filling out the loan application is only the beginning, and there are many, many steps to get the final results.