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Gratitude and Thanksgiving

For 26 years, I have been running variations of this Thanksgiving column. During the years when I had stopped posting regular blog entries, I started writing regular entries in a gratitude journal, which got me to thinking of the difference between thankful and grateful. Google isn't much help:

Grateful: feeling or showing an appreciation of kindness; thankful.
Thankful: pleased and relieved, grateful

So, basically, it treats the words as synonymous. I do still give thanks for my health and my family. I am also grateful to have them in my life. I am grateful to be of use, to my family and others. [Turns out service is a Love Language] I am grateful for the love I get and the loving kindness I am now obliged to give everyone, since my heart Chakra opened.

If you feel life has been dealing to you from the bottom of the deck, I recommend the practice of keeping a gratitude journal. Write down one or two things each day for which you are grateful. Big or small, serious or silly. It can be an interesting and rewarding activity.

Me? I’m grateful for everything. Family, career, health, another beautiful day, and one more chance to set foot on this good green Earth. Happy Thanksgiving!

Link To My Poem: Pandemic Thanksgiving


Things no one will ever do again 3: Wander the neighborhood

My best friend in grade school, Tom Kervin, lived a block over from me in our working class neighborhood, an area of perfectly flat 50X100 lots. Easy to bicycle. Easy to Trick or Treat. Easy to deliver newspapers.

Tom’s parents were from the Midwest, and they didn’t lock the door to their house. The most serious problem they ever suffered from that in the 60’s was moochers showing up at dinner time for some of Tom’s mother’s amazing cooking. Even I showed up now and then, for a second dinner (I also showed up for a second breakfast at Lavada Nudo’s house, but I think I’ve already told that story).

We wandered the neighborhood, played baseball on the street, spent time in each other’s backyards, garages and basements. Many of the people in the neighborhood had been there since the 40’s, when my dad grew up in the house next door. My dad and I both created newspapers called the Beech Street Bugle. We sold subscriptions (25 cents) to many of the same people.

The point of all this? We were free-range children, a group now so rare that they are identified that way, as a minority. Today’s frightened parents in a scary world will insure that almost no one will wander the neighborhood again with unlocked doors, street baseball, and all-day games of Risk.


This and That

(Want more regular This and That items? Send me some)

Reading: Medium
($5 a month)
Fascinating fact and opinion. Writers get 3 cents per view and 7 cents per read. PAID! For $15 a month, the writers you read get quadruple pay.

Reading: Patreon (price varies)
If you get around much, you’ve seen some content creator ask you to subscribe to them on Patreon. Real money. If you are a creator, sign up. If you Patreon, sign up. I follow Tom Rush.

Reading: Gocomics ($14.99 a year or free)
I pay the premium to get reminders by mail. I love Tom the Dancing Bug, Lay Lines, and Over The Hedge, not available in my local paper. If you’re into Zombies, see Popeye or Mutt and Jeff.


Presidential Blowback

Any best or worst list, no matter how deftly selected (and mine was one of the deftest), is a matter of arguable opinion. Among the comments was one by Robert Malchman, which I have elevated to the column itself:

Pierce was worse than Fillmore, and Buchanan was worse that Pierce. Buchanan did nothing in December 1860 when the southern states started seceding, including not removing weapons from the federal armories in the South. He is the second-worst President in history (I rank him as worse than Andrew Johnson). Reconstruction was going to end in 1877 one way or another. If Hayes hadn't made the deal, the electoral votes would have gone to Tilden, who would have been beholden to southern Democrats and ended Reconstruction on his own. Hayes actually did what he could faced with a Democratic Congress in the second half of his term, vetoing bills designed to repeal the Enforcement Acts passed during Reconstruction. Hayes was far from being great, but he was just as far from being one of the stinkers we had from 1849-1861.


Feel Better Photo

A skateboarder from 1979, then and now (the now picture requires a lot of scrolling). By way of Brendan at Semi-Rad.

Under current conditions, this photo is a gift from God. Kind of like the photograph from the Oregon historical society of my mom, in the Oregon Journal, with her hundreds of plants, which misspelled her name in the caption (it’s Mari). She's gone and so are the plants, but this is a time we can and should take comfort from the past.