Home 365 Days of Thankfulness: 91-120

July 29, 2014
  1. I ride a bike to work, cars screaming by doing 50 in a 35 zone, any one of them could boot me into the next county like the meaningless bug splats on their windshields, yet I pedal along fearlessly. I pound head first into 30 tons of water that could crush me like a toothpick, yet I paddle into them ferociously. I live the next day not knowing whether the contrived currency we call money will provide for those I love and float on clouds of assurance without fear. As my body ages, I'm aware of growing frailties I never knew in my youth, but they do not make me afraid. Though I am bound helplessly to the machines of commerce and the chains of production, noisy Shakespearean players on stages that signify nothing, I am thankful the fears and insecurities that plagued my earlier days have withered away. I mean, whatchoo gonna do, kill me? That's all you got? :-)

    "Love is what we were born with. Fear is what we learned here."
  2. I am thankful for the sound of my wife's sneezes.

    "And every time she sneezes I believe it's love and oh lord, I'm not ready for this sort of thing."
  3. I often get settled and comfortable with the status quo and daily repetition, and have to constantly remind myself I am thankful for change. If we don't initiate changes in our lives, the universe has a way of kicking us out of the nest and doing it for us. Without change we don't grow, we fade away on a treadmill of desperation, and as we all know, it's better to burn out than to fade away.

    If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading."
  4. It was overcast and rainy today, I had to wear pants for the first time all year (I usually wear shorts, get your mind out of the gutter.) Gray drizzly days always put me in a little bit of a funk, and today I realized why. I am thankful for any day I can see my shadow, it means the light of the world shines on me, warms my soul and stokes my passions. I don't curse the rain, and I'm thankful for the gift of water, but I miss the sunshine that lights my way and carves my form over the Earth at the speed of light.

    "When walking through the 'valley of shadows,' remember, a shadow is cast by a light."
  5. I am thankful that I never need a holiday created by capitalism to express gratitude, celebrate the one-ness that humanity can become, the love for my one and only, the freedom of my spirit, thanks for those who have died that I may know these joys, or the change that King put in our minds. These live with me daily. The days off are very cool though, thank you to all my employers who funded them. :-)

    "One man came in the name of love. One man he resist."
  6. Most of my life I've been afraid of being in deep water. If I couldn't touch bottom or if escape wasn't very close I would panic and never felt so close to death as I did floundering in water. Likely you see the irony because I surf, but over the years I've faced this fear head on and brought it to the most unpredictable condition possible, the broiling surf at the ocean's edge, which often holds me to the sandy bottom demonstrating it's power in an ominous demand for my respect. I am thankful I have not only made peace with my fear of water, it has become a comfort to my soul; it is the only other place I feel truly at home. My wife finds it ironic for a completely different reason: my birth sign is a fire sign, not a water sign. Meh. I hold to the premise that my sign is "slippery when wet."

    "If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water."
  7. Last week as I was getting out of the water, A young guy just arriving says "this is my first time surfing, today. Just got this board and have to try it." We chatted, he the pulls out an O'Neill Epic Wetsuit and asks, "is this the front?" I said "yeah, but you have it inside-out." He gets into the suit and says, "Can you zip me up?" I said I could, but you have to learn to do it yourself . . . and showed him how to reach around and grab the strap to pull up the zipper. I told him to show up Saturday in the A.M., it's better for learning . . . and he did. We paddled out, showed him a thing or two . . . he wasn't ready for the work involved, but it was okay, he got in, paddled out, gave it the first shot. I'm always thankful for the reminders that for every challenge there is a first time, and all the times I felt intimidated going for that first try, often without someone to help. I'm really thankful I was there for his first, and I had the chance to be the guy to help.

    "Whenever a thing is done for the first time, it releases a little demon."
  8. Cats are such graceful animals, the way they strut about with the air of goddesses, leap to pedestals with grace and prowess, flip their tails at you in a gesture of apathy, then curl around your legs like you mean the world. Sometimes though, they slip and fall, misjudge a leap and plop to the floor like a sandbag only to regain their composure and look at you slant-eyed, as if to say, "you didn't see that" or "that's what I meant to do." I am thankful the most graceful and composed of us lose their grip and show their less graceful side, in doing so, allow me to forgive my own clumsiness, and gauge how to recover.

    "Mistakes are a fact of life. It is the response to the error that counts."
  9. Last Saturday we were on the trolley heading downtown for the Halloween festivities and an intoxicated guy with a bagged can of Colt 45 missed his stop, the doors closed and he stood there pushing on them. "Push the green button," my wife said, but the train started and he nearly fell over, stumbling, catching the pole and swung around to a seat. He asked, "can you do it for me?" The next stop she did, and he staggered off the train - only to appear in the doorway a few seconds later, and quietly said "thank you" before turning away. I realized today I am thankful I still generally have faith in people. We are all born perfect, unformed, an empty slate. It's the stuff that happens to us along the way that causes us to fall or shine. No doubt there are evil and bad people in the world, but in every person I meet I open the possibility for them to let the original perfect human present itself. It usually works, even in the most unlikely encounters.

    "People are like stained glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within."
  10. I've saved this one specifically for #100. I am thankful for my only daughter, Alia, born name Shoshanah, who I always say is the one thing I managed to do right. She has enriched my life and taught me more about myself than any teacher or mentor ever did, though I seldom wanted to learn the lessons. It was never an easy life for us; I was a troubled person and often a poor parent, but somehow she managed to develop into a strong and thoughtful adult that makes me feel confident the future is in good hands. She thinks I'm a dork, sometimes (or is it always) can't stand to be around me, extremely critical of anything I say or do, but who isn't embarrassed by their parents? :-P At 25 she'd gone farther in life that I had at 40 and continues to climb. I am honored to know her and call her daughter.

    "A father is always making his baby into a little woman. And when she is a woman he turns her back again."
  11. Last night I had a conversation with one of my brothers, who, like me, has had a nasty habit of hanging on to the past and coloring his future with it. After serving in the Navy, he spent many years struggling to secure gainful employment. Recently he has given up not only his past but nearly all of his possessions, jumped in his car, and just started driving. During this journey he made a single phone call and a job opened up for him . . . just like that. It reminded me how thankful I am of the ability to let go of the past to make room for a new future. Empty your present of the past and abundance and light rushes in to fill the void. This wasn't an easy thing for me to learn, and some days I still resist, but each time I let go, my arms become free to gather a fresh harvest of the unknown.

    "When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be. When I let go of what I have, I receive what I need."
  12. I am thankful that I got to spend some time with one of my brothers who I haven't seen in 15 years and I am able to be a stop on his new journey in life. Sometimes you may think a story has ended, assign the meanings to it as you like - life has a way of rewriting the remakes that will surprise you.

    "Just when I think I have learned the way to live, life changes."
  13. I had a reminder today that I came from an environment where women were things to own, decorations to display, trophies about which to brag, and men were not noble or just or masculine, they were animals, crushing all that lay before them to become the sources of worldly things with designer labels like Mercedes, Gucci, and Sax, murderous banks and tills from which status symbols were drawn and measured. The knowledge that it was ever a way to be or think turned my stomach and made me ill, like the feeling a recovered heroin addict must feel pondering the first stab of the needle that led them into the shadows. I am thankful this reminder came to me today, and am sad for those still trapped in the lies that forever divide us.

    "Love does not claim possession, but gives freedom."
  14. I am thankful for sculpting. Wood, soapstone, plaster, salt licks, the blood and blisters that come from working the chisels and the constant stabs to my fingers and hands mark the process more powerfully than the result. I was never very good at it but something about chipping away the pieces to release the spirit you know lives in there has such purpose as you're doing it.

    "Sculpture is the art of the hole and the lump."
  15. I am thankful I see myself forever as a student, and hopeful I will never graduate. Once you feel you know all you need to know, there is no need to learn any more, and that is a frightful place to live; the only thing that grows with each day is your ego. The more I learn, the bigger the world gets, the less I seem to know, and the more I need to learn. It's comforting to know I will never run out of things to learn as long as I am open to the lessons.

    "A man ceases to be a beginner in any given science and becomes a master in that science when he has learned that he is going to be a beginner all his life."
  16. What I've never considered, and came to be during weekend's retreat for Boys to Men, is that I never recognized or acknowledged who the teenage "me" was, or thanked him for bringing me to this moment. Sit with a picture of your teenage self and ask, what is this young person thinking at the moment this shutter snapped, what is he or she going through? What are their greatest fears and dreams? What is the one thing they are dying to hear from someone, anyone? As the adult you are, right now, look into this picture and tell that awkward, frightened, confused teenage boy or girl that they are perfect as they are, and thank them for having the strength to take on whatever battles life threw at them that allowed you to see this day, to grow into who you are. They were more powerful than they ever knew, for in their hearts was the power of the future that has become YOU. I'm thankful for this revelation and all that it means. Teenage Bill, you put up with a lot of shit man, every mistake you made grew into lessons far greater than the consequences. You had no clue what you were doing but you rode the tsunami like a f**ing pro, and laid before you joys you can't even imagine. Thank you, I owe you everything.

    "Self-love is the source of all our other loves."
  17. I am thankful for my love of women. I was raised in an environment where we "told" women we loved them, confused lust with love, spent our lives "making them happy" (good luck with that) as a means to possess and control them for our own selfish desires. It wasn't until I realized the women in my life were just as confused and afraid as I was that I grew to respect and love them for the beautiful, strong, and fragile creatures they are. Every curve, movement, and thought pattern that makes women different from us as men are attributes to be honored and worshiped, we are fortunate to have them in our lives. Most men see unclothed women as naked, I see them as nude: the essence of femininity revealed, not exposed, to the world. There is another side to this coin, the hope that some of the women that see us as neanderthals and tools may grow see us in similar but different ways (and for some of us, forgive our various stages of growth.) I am also thankful I have found one that does.

    "What would men be without women? Scarce, sir ... mighty scarce."
  18. I love that one of my wife's favorite bands is ZZ Top. Though I'm seldom a sharp dressed man, she's never left me eating TV dinners because I couldn't keep my Velcro fly under control lookin' for some tush. We breakaway and go strollin' up to La Grange in my cheap sunglasses with my sleeping bag, watching those Mexican blackbirds flyin' high, she puts me under pressure in stages, makin' me feel like I'm (oh so) bad. Just me and my girl in a t-shirt who got legs and knows how to use them, always watching me with those penthouse eyes, wearing a pearl necklace, making me delirious, she's gonna give me all her lovin' and all I can say is . . . I thank you.

    "She had a west coast strut that was sweet as molasses, but what really knocked me out was her cheap sunglasses."

    (For the record, there's 20, can you spot them all without the help of Google? :-) )
  19. I am thankful for the complete stranger who hung out with me when I was 13 until the wee hours of the morning in a deserted and dangerous part of Los Angeles. After school on Fridays I would make the trek by foot from 227th street, my wooden wheel skates tied by their strings over my shoulder, past Carson and up into the industrial district to dive into endless nights filled with the humid melange of wood dust and sweat, the feel of the centrifugal force as I threw myself hard into the corners, ignoring the whistles of the skate guards to slow down, the delicious scent of young girls' perfume as I raced through their slipstreams, the occasional brush of other skaters in that eternal loop around our local skating rink. I was always told to walk to the rink but do not try to walk home, when it closes at 10 we will be there to pick you up. Don't walk home because there are monsters that only come out at night, and they weren't the monsters that lived in my house. One night . . . my parents didn't come. The rink closed, the doors were locked, the lights went out, the skaters got in their cars one by one until all that remained in the dark parking lot were this worried teenager and one guy who's ride also didn't come, a bearded and lanky man in his 20's who I like to think was there nightly to capture a skating queen in his net, and for whatever reason failed in his quest this night. We sat in the parking lot against the rink wall in the cold L.A. night, chilled by the blue neon streetlamps, talked about skating, the beach, school, parents, those elusive creatures known as girls, and when he saw I was shivering he lent me his coat. Around 3 AM a faded blue Buick careened around the corner, lights on an angle, tires screaming in an angry and frenzied path of urgency, one that marked the end of this night and a return to the hell I called home. Dude I wish I could remember your name, I wish there was a way to find you and thank you to your face, and hope you found your skate princess (or a few.) Thanks man. You were a hero that night. You didn't just keep me safe, you showed me what it means to be a man of valor in a world that seems to have lost the meaning of the word.

    "Valor is common but great souls are rare."
  20. I am thankful for the earthy and often horrific yarns spun by Stephen King. I've read them all, some three or four times. Critics discounted him as a cheap pulp fiction writer who's drivel wasn't worth the (magic) paper it was printed on but every word of his stories screamed of love, hate, truth, reality, and very often the ultimate loss, the uncomfortable and imperfect conditions of being human. He held in his pen the power to scare the living shit out of us; if he couldn't get a scare, he went for the gross-out, and it always worked. I remember seeing him for the first time after the release of Carrie on the Dick Cavett show, a chubby, pimply faced lad, with horn rimmed glasses that looked like they were cut out of the bottoms of coke bottles, chuffing cigarettes and trying to maintain an air of purpose, but I could see right through it. Stephen, you are one of us. You're one of the ones who lived our struggles, wrestled with the devil and found a way to put it all into words we could understand, words that affirmed the common man or woman is really all that matters. Every time you prefaced your stories with "Dear constant reader," you had me, I was yours.

    "The place where you made your stand never mattered. Only that you were there, and still on your feet."
  21. I am thankful for the first artifact of music I ever owned, a 45 r.p.m. single of Badfinger's "Day after Day." It had the image of a sliced green apple on both sides, the core punched out for the 45 adapter, the artists names, titles, and all the legal mumbo jumbo printed over the white of the apple in a bold serif font. I would get home from school, open my fold-up General Electric stereophonic hi-fi phonograph with a speaker on each side of the turntable, gently settle the diamond stylus on the edge of the spinning disc, the sound of static crackling as it spiraled in to the first valleys etched into the vinyl that amplified into the most beautiful sound I'd ever heard. I would kneel in front of the turntable like an altar boy at mass, my head held directly over the turntable between the speakers to get the full impact of rhythm guitar left, piano and lead right, the sharp knives of cymbal and snare in my ears, the gritty sounds of rock and roll massaging my soul and speaking to me, only me. My mom would walk in, pause with her hands on her hips and say "you really like that song, don't you?" "Mom. It's the only record I have." That changed very quickly, and what a revolution it started in my life.

    "I remember holding you while you sleep. Every day I feel the tears that you weep."
  22. I am thankful for that first time I realized the world was not as I had learned. In our house, there was no Hippie Music, no noise of long haired freaks banging on guitars, and most of all that scourge they call the Fab Four, those G***amn Beatles, they were a symptom of All That Is Wrong With the World, a pestilence on America, someone should send them back to England where they belong. No son of mine is going to be a G***amn Hippie, you can bet your ass on that. One Saturday my old man was sitting in his Lazy-Boy recliner, Budweiser in hand, oblivious to the usual flurry of activity in a home with three boys, but it was a lucky day for us because the radio was playing. Out of the crackling AM radio the first solemn strings of "Yesterday" bloomed like spring flowers, McCartney's sad ballad echoing through the walls of our house, washing it with joy and light and feeling, and we all stopped what we were doing to just listen, be a part of that moment.

    My old man laid his head back and closed his eyes; it was the only time I can remember his face softened from the angry scowl he usually carried to a relaxed and open presence. As the song ended he opened his eyes and said to no one in particular, "now THAT'S music." Something welled inside me, I knew what it would do, but I couldn't help myself.

    "Dad. You know that's the Beatles, right?" He launched out of the Lazy-Boy like a cannon in an instant rage, slamming the footrest against the chair so hard it shook the whole house, threw his beer across the room and screamed "Don't you say that! Don't you EVER say that! They COPIED it!" We all did what we did when the monster awoke, retreated to our rooms and tried to hide under our cloaks of invisibility.

    This moment haunted me for days with confusion, guilt, anger and shame until I realized what it meant. If he could be so wrong about the Beatles, maybe he was wrong about other things too. Maybe he was wrong about everything. Maybe there WAS a reason to hope, and be happy, and create a tomorrow that has nothing to do with the past. As it turned out, he was.

    "The truest characters of ignorance are vanity and pride and arrogance."
  23. hoedad I am thankful for the first job I got arriving in Oregon, the six weeks I spent living in a tree planting camp with Vietnamese refugees after the fall of Saigon.* The job was temporary; re-planting trees in the strip-logged mountains above Prospect. I arrived at the campground to what looked like an Army encampment with 7 or 8 large Army tents spread out under the firs and pines, each with a pot belly stove in the middle, and only the head crew boss and a few others spoke English. I befriended a guy named Vinh, who translated for me when the camp bosses were yelling at me in exchange for helping him with his English. We slept in Army issue cots around the stoves, rose at 4 AM, climbed in the crummy (huge van) which wound its way up the logging roads to the top of the mountain where we spent our days burdened with bags of fir seedlings and swinging a hoedad. Axe the hoedad over your head and into the ground, lift the handle to expose a crevice in the earth, shake the roots of a seedling in, stomp on it to seal the roots, take six large steps, repeat. All day. When it was time to retire to camp, the cooks would dangle bent sewing needles by a string into the creek to snag brook trout (illegally of course, but it's what they learned.) They would then cook them for us in woks over an open fire along with rice and variations of Pho, Bun bo Hu, and a lot of other dishes I can't remember. I would sit with them around the fires, oblivious to the topic of conversation, but I could sense their joy and community: we have escaped the devastation of our homeland, we are Americans now, and a new world lays before us. At the time I thought I hated it, my muscles ached, my hands blistered, I longed for a real bed and am sure I whined like a little girl about it but never gave up until the camp moved on to Idaho six weeks later. Looking back . . . it was one of the greatest jobs I ever had.

    "When was the last time you heard news accounts of a boatload of American refugees arrive on the shores of another country?"

    These were "boat people," see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_boat_people
  24. I never realized until this moment I am thankful for distractions. They always seem to annoy me, dammit I am doing something IMPORTANT here, something that needs to be done, something that requires completion, can't you see I'm busy with something important? In humbling reply, the distractions tell me if it was all that important, you wouldn't allow yourself to be distracted, would you? How many times have I called to you and you refused to listen? How many joys and opportunities have you missed due to your interpretation of what is 'important'? Don't bother counting, what matters is that you see me now. They leave me shipwrecked on a sandy shore in a world I thought was only made of water, one in which I thought there was only swimming and discovered I could also walk.

    "In reality, the most important things happen when you don't look for them."
  25. I touched on this in #9, but from a perspective of marriage and all the intimate commitment it means. Of all the people I know, I am thankful for the most significant person in my life, my most constant friend and anchor, who also happens to be my wife. She is the rudder that steers me straight when I fall astray, helps me define the difference between delusions and dreams, accepts the many (**MANY**) faults I struggle with, remains my best friend when I'm insufferable, says many things I don't really want but need to hear, does things with me because they give me joy even though she's really not interested, and gives me a point of reference to define what is important from what is trivial. If you find such a friend in the world, tell them so with all the authenticity you can bear. The opportunities to do so dwindle with every moment.

    "A friend is one who knows you and loves you just the same."
  26. All our kids grew up and moved out at least 10 years ago. I was rather comfortable with no children in my house. A few months ago my wife's daughter and her 3 year old moved in with us temporarily until she gets a job. A part of me was uncomfortable with it, having to child proof my house, accepting the fact that from time to time my clothes would bear the badges of a toddler's bugars, finding the items in my personal spaces rearranged with the logic of a three year old madman, the sharp pain in the middle of the night stepping on a stray Spider Man action figure or forgotten Lego piece en route to the kitchen, the disruption of my sleep patterns, morning rituals, and comfort zones by a 3 year old terrorist that holds our lives and hearts hostage. I'm not sure if it's a sense of responsibility or if he's teaching me things I'd forgotten about myself, but somewhere in there I am thankful he has entered my life and more importantly that I can be there to help him begin his.

    "What would the child you once were think of the person you are now?"
  27. I am thankful for my bike and the rides it takes me on. It's a cheap, heavy $129 Wal Mart model and I've invested four inner tubes, two tires, three sets of cheap pedals, and countless squirts of WD-40 on it in over 3 years. I ride it to work and back every day, and sometimes at night when I have a need to get out and feel the wind of the night air rushing through my hair, powered only by the pistons of the two legs beneath me. We have a car and a truck, I could drive. I don't ride out of any ecological reasoning or a facetious desire for some healthy goal, I ride because my body aches for movement and life, and because I still can.

    "I can think. I can sleep. I can move. I can ride my bike. I can dream."
  28. I am thankful for all the things I got a chance to experience before the world swallowed them up with profit and loss charts, litigation, and financial interests. Among them are The Funnel, across from the Starlite Theatre in Los Angeles, an access drive to the L.A. River with concrete hills on both sites that was a skateboarder's mecca, now impossible due to concrete strips laid across it's walls; the Radio Shack of the old days that used to be a genuine electronics store stocked with transistors, silicon controlled rectifiers, transformers, all sorts of other magical widgets and gadgets with which I created many electronic projects (and got the bejeebus shocked out of me many times,) now a cheap retail outlet for disposable foreign electronics; the awesome power that shook the very rocks on which I stood at the underground bridges near Prospect, Oregon, a place where an entire river vanishes into the ground and emerges several hundred feet downstream, all fenced off now. I never knew what I had with them at the time, but am thankful for them now.

    "Nothing is more expensive than a missed opportunity."
  29. Of all the modern conveniences humans enjoy, I'm probably most thankful for plumbing. Imagine a world without toilets. Seriously. Where would we read our morning news if it weren't for the loo?

    "You know an odd feeling? Sitting on the toilet eating a chocolate candy bar."
  30. Often I've asked, "how can I help, what can I do?" and the question was invariably answered with a request for a donation or a pledge of money I never really had. This left me feeling unempowered and helpless to make a real difference in the world; if it's all about money and I don't have any, how can I possibly make a difference? I am thankful for two realizations; the first is that throwing money at a problem has never done anything but perpetuate the problem, extend the misery of those we're trying to help, and forever cast them in a perpetual cycle of dependency. The second is that the ultimate resource in solving the world's problems, both locally and globally, is our time and the willingness to donate it. I used to say I don't have time, I now know that was a synonym for "it's not that important to me" in disguise. Our time, attention, and presence is a far greater gift to humanity than a scribbled check to charity. It makes it real.

    "The best gift you can give to someone is your time."

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