Forever on Thanksgiving Day
The heart will find the pathway home.
-Wilbur D. Nesbit
Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays, for a few reasons.
1. It is a well-named and worthily themed holiday. Thanksgiving, giving thanks—real gratitude, in my opinion is a very, very good thing. It is a Virtue. On balance, we humans are perhaps not as grateful as we could be. It is simply one of those hard things to remember to do, and to be. We get so darned busy with the “stuff”, that we forget what’s really important, I guess…. In Henry VI, Shakespeare has the title character ask: “O Lord that lends me life, Lend me a heart replete with thankfulness.” A good thing to ask for.
2. It is a “Home” holiday. Anybody who knows me, knows that I have an inexorable pull, an irresistible need sooner rather than later, to go home. As with the character Maximus in the movie Gladiator, I just want to finish my task, whatever that task is, and then I want to go home. Period. (And like Maximus, I always have a terrible foreboding that I will be just a little too late in arriving there…)
3. Which brings me to my next reason: Home is (usually) where the Women are. And I am fairly sure that that is what draws me there. Women. And if I have anything to give thanks for in this (and probably other) lifetimes, it is the Women in my life.
So I am going to raise my glass to Women this Thanksgiving, (and privately send up a little Prayer of Gratitude) specifically for my Mother, and my Sister, and my Wife, and my Daughter. Four magical, wonderful, beautiful Women. They carry me, as all Women everywhere carry all of us foolish men, both literally and figuratively, from the beginning to the end. They darn well deserve our Gratitude, our Thanksgiving, every single minute of every single day.
The very first
Of human life must spring from woman’s breast,
Your first small words are taught you from her lips,
Your first tears quench’d by her, and your last sighs
Too often breathed out in a woman’s hearing,
When men have shrunk from the ignoble care
Of watching the last hour of him who led them.
-Lord Byron, Sardanapalus, Act 1, Scene 2
“I will say again, that when Christ came into this world, women rejoiced in him before either man or angel. I read not that man ever gave unto Jesus so much as one groat; but the women followed him, and ministered unto him of their substance. ‘T was a woman that washed his feet with tears, and a woman that anointed his body to the burial.”
-John Bunyan
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