1) Health
Good health is relative. In January of 1986, at age 17, I lay in a hospital bed paralyzed from the neck down. As I slowly recovered from Guillain-Barre Syndrome, through observation of other patients at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, I realized I was lucky. I spent four months of my life in the hospital, then a few more months in a wheelchair, a few more with a walker/cane, but by September I was walking on my own.
Today, I am not in as good of shape as I’d like to be. I’d like to lose about twenty pounds. But beyond being overweight, I am generally healthy, for which I am thankful.
2) Close Family
Talking with others, I know my family is unusual. We are all speaking with one another, we get along well, and there’s no one I can think of in my extended family – parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins – who I have to put up a false front to get along with whenever I see them. On the contrary, if asked about each of my relatives, I think I would put a check mark by each one and say that I would rather see them more often, than less often.
3) Friends
I have developed a lot of good friendships over the past fifteen years in the science fiction fan community, as well as through my writer’s group, and at poetry open mics. At my high school’s twentieth reunion in September I was reminded that I had for the most part lost all contact with my high school friends. There are some signs that some of those friendships could be reestablished.
Today is T-Day+1.
Thankful?
Count your blessings.
That’s the stuff you have or don’t have.
You count the good and can only discount the bad —
because, of the former, there is a finity,
and, of the latter, there is seemingly no end.
For instance, I am thankful I am not GW Bush.
I am thankful everyday for that,
but should I be especially on T-Day for it?
Likewise, I am glad not to be Dick Cheney, Condoleeza Rice, and so on.
I am thankful for those blessings, too, everyday.
But, I discount all that and those that I am not —
there’s just too many of these evil people in the world, past or present.
And, too, I am thankful not to be Mother Tersa or Doctor Schweitzer,
despite what ,“he says.” http://www.wisdomquotes.com/000769.html
I want to be neither a sinner nor a saint;
I must be blessed to find that I am not.
But, all such discounting is tedious, at best.
What am I means
what stuff do I have that is me?
Well, nothing.
It’s all dusty layers of my dust collection,
not even as well organized as an onion —
a strong wind will blow it all to kingdom come,
or even a Kingdom City.
So let us go on being thankful,
praising our living among kin and kindred souls,
even vicariously, like this.
Say, Hey === Turkey got you down?
— if you don’t blog, my mind’s as bleak as a blank…
— it may be that anyway, but your posts preoccupy me
— from such a possibly bitter-sweet truth.
In the meantime, I can always re-read
Shibboleth: for Paul Celan, by J Derrida —
to fix on a date of my circumcision, perhaps,
or any dating of it, antedating and predating —
an event that may not have come to an end,
coming to the same end a circumcision did,
at least the end that always remains,
when anything at all remains behind.
The donative giving of a date — dah!!!
A date comes but once JD says of PC,
as if it’s time’s a turning ever returning
to make out with our dating system.