My Family and I are Thankful to Share This Thanksgiving with You
My family and I have much to be thankful for this year, not the least of which are the care provided by my daughter, Stephanie, who cares 24/7 for my wife and her mother, Thea who continues to recover her memory. I am personally in good health, walking four to five miles a day, with the assistance of my new aortic heart valve that was inserted with a
transcatheter heart valve (TVR).
I am thankful for you, my friends, clients and readers of “Zalma’s
Insurance Fraud Letter,” my blog “Zalma on Insurance,” my Substack
publications, my videos on Rumble.com and YouTube.com and my books and other writing including the new Third Edition of the ten volumes of my treatise, “Zalma on Insurance Claims.”
Please allow me this opportunity to explain to you all the things I, and my family, can give thanks for:
1. I have loved my wife of 55 years since we first met when she was nine and I was twelve.
2. I am thankful that she still loves me and lets me make clear every
day that I love her more now than I did when she ignored me when I was 12.
3. My three adult children who are successes in their own right.
4. That my three children, my almost seven-year-old granddaughter live nearby, put up with my wife and I, and are healthy, successful, and mostly happy in what they do.
5. That my grandson graduated from Puget Sound University in Washington state and is now working full time for a major business in Los Angeles.
6. My clients who, for the more than 55 years have allowed me to earn a living doing what I love: practicing law until I let my license go inactive, acting as a consultant, testifying as an expert witness,
writing materials to help others provide excellence in claims services and creating videos to help every member of the insurance profession learn more about insurance and insurance claims handling.
7. My publishers the American Bar Association, Full Court Press,
Fastcase.com, Thomson Reuters and Amazon.com.
8. My dearly departed parents and grandparents for having the good sense
to leave the Ottoman Empire at the beginning of the 20th Century so we
could avoid the Holocaust and I could be born American.
9. My country for giving me a place to live and work in peace and
complain about it without fear.
10. The state of California, where I was born, and have lived for 81
years, for allowing me to have my home and grow my family, and the
ability to pay the high taxes for the privilege.
11. Those of you who read what I write and gain something from it.
12. Eighty one years of mostly good health, but for a small heart
attack, clogged arteries and a deteriorated aortic heart valve, that
gave me the ability to continue to work – albeit at a reduced rate
because of the skills of my cardiologists and the St. John’s hospital in
Santa Monica.
13. Allowing me the health and ambition to avoid my cardiologist by
walking every day and working on my garden and bonsai.
14. The hundreds of friends I have never met but with whom the Internet
has allowed me to communicate in parts of the world I have never
visited.
15. The wonder of the Internet that allows me to publish E-books,
Zalma’s Insurance Fraud Letter (ZIFL) and my blog instantly on line.
16. That my family can get together to express our thanks for each other
and our happiness this year again without a need for anything but
enjoying each other’s company.
17. That most of you who I know only by my publications can also gather
with your families to express your thanks.
18. To those friends I meet almost every day as I walk along the Ballona Creek bike path.
I hope, on this Thanksgiving weekend, that you can join my family and me remembering that it is more important to think about our blessings and those things that we have to be thankful for than to get in line for “Black Friday” to buy an inexpensive flat screen t.v. or tablet.
Enjoy the holiday and your family as I will.
(c) 2023 Barry Zalma