Thanksgiving

It is the morning after Thanksgiving and all through the house not even a mouse stirs. Except for me. After dinner last night I was too heavy with food and drink to be able to focus on this week’s column so I got up relatively early to gather my thoughts together.

My company just started working with a new client, Gershon Bergwerk and Resume.com. Gershon is married to a woman who was born in France and every year his in-laws fly over from France because they find it wonderful that an entire country stops to say: thanks. And to do it with food, which is very French, even if our menu for the day is very not French.

It is a holiday I think we take for granted. It’s always been there, like Christmas, the beginning, in my mind, of the annual Holiday season and an exhortation to get shopping if I haven’t already.

But last night, with our friends Larry and Alicia, we took a moment over the first glass of champagne to stop and do our best to acknowledge the enormous number of things we have to be grateful for. Alicia started us thinking with her thought: how lucky we are not to have been born in Afghanistan.

We are, indeed, fortunate to have been born in this time, in this place. And I stop and think about that a great deal lately, when I sit and look out at the Claverack Creek and contemplate my life. I am more fortunate than 99.9% of the world and I so rarely stop and savor my luck.

I live with someone wonderful. I work at things which, for the most part, make me smile. I live comfortably in one of the most comfortable places in the world. We have great friends, like Larry and Alicia, with whom we share a history. And after they had departed other friends arrived to spend the weekend and continue our Thanksgiving.

As I often do, I perused the front page of the New York Times on line to see what was happening in the world – and it is still there in all its mounting woes. Israelis have died in Kenya, an Israeli airliner missed by missiles. In Iraq, weapons inspectors and beginning their work and the march toward or not toward war is happening whether or not we stop to say Thanks.

But we did stop and for a moment the world seemed very quiet and very right and very full of good will.

It is time to take my thanks from yesterday and carry it with me everyday and remember to say thanks even with all the violence and the tempers raging in the world because, at the end of the day, we are very very very lucky and I pray that luck will hold.