A month of thankfulness, Part Six

I want to share these posts with you, to help you consider what you are thankful for. Perhaps some are identical, perhaps some are analogous, perhaps some are completely foreign to you. But the thing that should stick with you is having an ATTITUDE of GRATITUDE, always. Just this one simple change in your life, on its own, can transform you.

Some of the details of these posts are rather personal; obviously, I'm not revealing anything i don't want to reveal. At this late stage, my life is an open book for reading and enhancement of others. But it also means there may be things which don't make sense because you don't know my background. Hopefully it will be clear enough in context, but leave a comment if there's something that's unclear, and I'll clarify. May God bless you in this season of thankfulness. 

A month of thanks. Very similar to any other month. No, really. I do this all the time.

Nov 23. I am thankful for traditions like the Thanksgiving holiday. No, it isn’t precisely like the storybooks say. No holiday is. Get over it: that’s not the most important part.

What is important is what those holidays and traditions mean to you individually. If Christmas means Christ or Santa or neither to one person, it means something different to another. Same with any other holiday, or any other kind of tradition, for that matter: birthdays, going back to school, weekends, dinnertime, whatever. They may not be good memories for everyone. The concept of “father” was a wonderful one for me; for my late wife Melissa, it was a series of nightmares. We have differing backgrounds, all of us.

So, with that realization, I am thankful for my traditions, growing up and as an adult. My childhood was filled with wonderful expectations - going to Uncle Cal and Aunt Phyllis’ for Christmas, driving over the pass to Aunt Pauline’s and watching the storm front come in so we’d know when we had to make a dash for it! Locally bought box of fireworks in July, home-painted eggs for Easter. Having to wait until Uncle Earl chose to wake up before we could open presents on the 25th, and not realizing until we were older he’d been faking the last part of his sleep to mess with us all along. Mom’s green noodle glop for Thanksgiving.

And as an adult, some have been traditions we’ve created... Driving around scouting Christmas lights (which started as Wendy’s and my vain attempt to get 10-month old Hamilton to fall asleep... driving from Idaho to Carson City to bring Thanksgiving to Aunt Pauline, and after the divorce and once she was no longer in her own home, taking her to whatever was open for the big meal (Denny’s was a great choice several years there)...

Even away from holidays, there were traditions for me: certain yearly items on the marching camp agenda, for example, like the silent shape-forming, or parading the neighborhood for the neighbors; Golden Corral in Pocatello and Chuck-A-Rama heading through Boise on competition Saturday’s; bag lunch lines, water trucks and the wagon dragging my twins along every parade route; “Story Time With Papa Smurf” or “Unka Bubba” or whichever school I was at in that period of time; the Band Awards Concert traditions and the graduation night traditions and all the other little rituals that made my job and my career so special.

They were all touchstones along life’s road, like each child’s birthday, and they came with the realization that one more year had passed - the kids were one year closer to moving on in life - I was one step closer to whatever God had in store for me next. And at least for the school-related ones, when I knew it was the last time I’d get to do one of them, it was always a moment to savor. I regret that I never had that with my Jerome career: unlike Penryn and Kuna and Payette (where each time I knew in April I was leaving), it just sort of... ended. I didn’t need any kind of “send-off”, but I felt deprived of that chance to savor the last Awards Concert, things like that.

But in life, we don’t get to know ahead of time that it’s the last one, usually. I didn’t know Mom or Dad would be dead by April when we celebrated Christmas the winter before, although we had a hunch in both cases. Much of 2008 and 2014 went by without my knowing the woman I was married to at that time wouldn’t be there when New Year’s Eve came around. And it’s like that with most of life - so savor every go-round like it’s the last, just to be safe, okay? Okay. God bless.

A month of thanks. No different than any other month, except that it’s on here for a change.

Nov 24. I am thankful for the amazing people I’ve met in my life. I’ve met thousands of ordinary ones, too, so many that after a while they molded together into types - I’d call one child Chris because he was just like a Chris I’d taught seventeen years prior, that sort of thing. Messed me up sometimes as I got old.

But in that there were so many unique individuals who made my life richer by being in it. There isn’t a chance in Heaven of naming them all, much less describing even a small fraction, but let me throw out a few to trigger thoughts in your mind, reader...

No.

That’s self-defeating. Naming individuals would just make me feel badly about the myriads I don’t name.

But besides parents and teachers and students during my teaching career, parents and classmates and teachers as a student, friends I met and women I dated and strangers whose paths I crossed, there were occasionally the marginally-famous like George Hopkins (Garfield Cadets director, whom I still correspond with occasionally) and Michael Levine (the creator of the Dallas Brass, and one of the most genuine human beings I’ve ever known) and Pete Emmons (Blue Devils tour coordinator at the time, who Wendy didn’t believe I’d met and hosted his corps at Kuna until his thank you letter arrived) and Phil Batt (former governor of Idaho, who wanted to play a concert with my band on clarinet but we never got the logistics to work) and George Zingali (famous drill writer whom I met at Whitewater and picked the brain of when I was a young show creator) and Claude T Smith (composer of my favorite band composition ever, “Emperata Overture”, and gracious beyond measure of the questioning of a teenage composer writing him questions in an era before email).

There were other “well known” people but frankly, they weren’t as distinctive or as memorable to me. I did see President Reagan in person from a distance when we were supposed to be playing for a campaign event in 1984. That’s as close to “really famous” as I ever got to see. But that’s unimportant compared to the value of the people who were vital in my life - too many to name, but not too many to treasure.

DETOUR: I just had a fascinating insight into how God works.

I'd just put the girls to bed, and as I’m walking to my chair, I notice Nalaleche, our youngest cat (age 2), chasing something on the door to their room. Worried she would keep the girls up with her scratching, I started to move towards her.

Then I realize what she’s chasing: the reflection of the name tag on our mama cat Merida’s collar. Not the first time that's happened. So rather than disturb Nala while she's right against the bedroom door, I simply turned Merida’s chair about fifteen degrees, moving the reflection out of Nala's direct view. No big deal, I think.

But look at it from the cats’ perspectives.

To Merida, for some random reason, her person turned her fifteen degrees to the right and sat down.

To Nalaleche, I didn’t even come near her - but somehow, the annoying light stopped. Problem solved.

And this is how God operates in our lives. He sees globally where we see only locally. So to solve my problem, he might turn something in your life slightly. I’ll never catch the connection, but my problem will go away, and you won’t see any detriment to your life, either.

For that matter, from my twins’ perspectives, they never even knew there was the potential of a problem because I (playing the role of God in this metaphor) solved it before it ever intruded into their lives.

How many times has God led you down a path when a different one seemed to have been just as good, and you wondered “what was all that about?” How many times has someone else’s similar path change unknowingly saved us from a hassle (or far worse)?

I remember Wendy and I stopping for a bite to eat in Weiser (when we still lived in Boise) when we really didn’t feel the need to; it was just an impulse. 45 minutes later, we got back on the road and saw the resultant damage from a twister that had touched down at that spot on our drive, um, about 45 minutes prior to our arrival. Had we not stopped? Yeah. That’s why we had the impulse. Lots of those in our lives if we listen. Lots more that we can’t explain because we don’t see what the effect or the change was - it was for someone else’s good fortune, not ours.

God treats us like His pets. And like His kids, if we’re lucky. And those are both good places to be.

A month of thanks. No different than any other month except for the fact that I posted them on Facebook all month long. And now I'm sharing them all with you. 

Nov 25. I am thankful that God placed me in a nation where I lived among the richest people in the world and always knew where my next meal was coming from. Because I really enjoy food.

Food was always my vice. Never smoked, drank alcohol, or did any illegal drugs (none of my current medications act on me “that way” - they merely keep me alive and/or out of pain). Never was a sexoholic, chocoholic, or any of those compulsions. Whatever tendencies I had towards OCD or any other such syndrome were minor at most.

But when I was most depressed, I might be caught eating an entire box of cookies or bag of Hawaiian sweet rolls. And I was fortunate in that avenue to be economically blessed to be able to acquire food at a moment’s notice, and for that matter I was blessed to have always been with women who were amazing cooks. Wendy and Melissa and Dana and Mirian were all amazing in the kitchen... hmm, the next sentence was erased for a good reason.

My weight was my punishment for the vice of overeating. I could always see my feet, but I was hardly ever a “healthy” weight. Of course, the TAM will kill me off long before the effects of being borderline obese will. And the restrictions that my rather mild Crohn’s Disease places on me are hardly worth mentioning.

I love good food. Thank you, Lord.