Thanksgiving is fast becoming the red-headed stepchild of American holidays, wedged between candy driven Halloween and present laden Christmas. My parents taught me it was a Yankee holiday, as opposed to say Easter, which is all about God and sacrifice and state's rights and not about slavery at all. But now that I’m a parent, I’ve been thinking more and more about things to be thankful for around Thanksgiving.
Other people seem to be a lot more attuned to what to be thankful for than I am. As my wife was saying the other day, “God put you on this earth to wear jeans and no shirt,” so I guess I know what she’s thankful for. Despite that being a more convincing argument for the existence of a loving diety than any I’ve ever heard advanced by organized religion, it doesn’t help me figure out what I am truly thankful for. Any, and usually every, jack hole can be thankful for their family, their friends, their health, the new Lexus sedan out front, blah blah blah.
If you ever give a luxury car with a bow as a gift, I'll break into your house and make you watch Fight Club until you get it.
Anyone with their health and a spouse and kids they like should be thankful for those things – that’s a given. But I think what we should really be thankful for is HOW or WHY you got those things.
Along the same lines, I spend a disturbing amount of time every month standing over the bodies of people who have come to a point in their lives where shooting it out with the cops is an option. And I always end up wondering how someone gets to that point. The answer is always the same- they started off a lot closer to that point than I did. I look around these scenes at the squalor and ignorance and hopelessness and it kind of makes sense how you could end up with two bullets in your chest and 65 cents in your pocket if that’s all you’ve ever known. So what I’m thankful for is that I was born lucky enough that that’s not all I’ve ever known. Because if I'd been born in those circumstances, given my personal fortitude, that's exactly where I'd have stayed.
What we should really be thankful for in not the kids or spouse or health – it’s who or what taught you that that was important and how to get it. Be thankful you were simply expected to go to college. Be thankful you grew up knowing what a stable household looked like, even if you didn’t have one yourself. Be thankful that somewhere along the way you learned that education and a modicum of effort, even for the truly inherently lazy and self-absorbed like myself, will lead you to a livable life that you enjoy. Be thankful for knowing enough to keep yourself healthy. Be thankful for unconsciously looking for a wife who makes you a better person. In other words, thank your parents raising you right around the right people in the right places.
Admittedly, there are some bumps in the road.
That’s not to say you shouldn’t be thankful for specific things. I thank my parents for instilling something in me that made me at least not fight it too hard when having children was suggested. But I am extremely, and very specifically, thankful I got the child I did. But she’s the end. What I am truly thankful for, is that someone provided me with the means that got me to her.
The Alpha and the Omega. I am but a vessel.
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