A Gratitude Journal

                               A Gratitude Journal

I am thankful

That in the midst of all these millions of atoms and molecules of this almost infinite universe I somehow managed to emerge out of nothing into the consciousness that am I

That I was blessed and fortunate enough to be birthed to two almost perfect parents who made me feel like me

That I had a younger brother who I could and would beat up almost daily until one day I discovered that I could no longer do so

That I was blessed with a baby sister who taught me how to love and who loved to sing with me and who was the only one of the several female human persons in my life who could ever stand my whistling

I am thankful 

For the stars I have come to know and love and admire even if I seldom see many of them now

For my eyesight even and especially as it begins to fail me now

For my hearing

For all the music I have known throughout my days and for all of it I have yet to discover

For my senses of smell and taste

For my mother’s pasta, which we knew as pasta before it was fashionable to call spaghetti pasta 

For wine

For hamburgers and hot dogs which I no longer eat now that I’m a vegetarian

For America

For money

For my mind

For being born into a bilingual family

For the boys who belittled and attacked me for being of Italian descent who showed me that not everyone is always nice

For Queens, New York in the fifties

For sandlot baseball and an actual one-pump gas station

For the pristine woods of Western Long Island where we moved with a horse farm and real hemp rope we would swing on

For sterno stoves and cigarettes stolen from our parents which we smoked in the woods and which mad us sick but not sick enough to take up the habit several years later

For teachers who taught us how to think critically, ask questions we could never get answers for, and gave us answers to those we could

For the Church, for the pre-Vatican II Church, with its sacred Latin liturgy where I would first encounter an abiding sense of mystery

For my father who told me to get a job one week after I turned twelve. So I got a paper route and for the next two-and-a-half years turned over every cent of the seven or so dollars I earned to my mother

For the hungry years

For my best friend Richie who I still know today

For my paper route customers

For their generosity and appreciation

For the pride I took in my work

For my bulldog Reggie who was strong and gentle at once

For birds in the sky 

For the music they make at evensong

For all the insects I so feared as a child and so reverence as an adult

For all the menial and seemingly meaningless jobs I had to engage in as a young adult on the way to becoming me

For my work as a mason-tender on construction, where I learned lessons that feed me even today

I am thankful.                        

For my varied and even checkered career as a teacher that I was never content to stay put in and because of that I taught and learned many things

For the abused and neglected children I met in the South Bronx, who showed me how lucky I was to be born into the family I was born into and how not everybody was born as fortunate as I

That for ten years I had to supplement my income as a short order cook and counterman after school when I learned humiliation, humility, and how to crack an egg with one hand

For my wife Lorraine

For her steady hand and eager heart

For her love

For her awful cancer, which brought me back to God

For my beautiful son David

For his beautiful son Joseph, my grandson

For my daughter-in-law, Carrie, who makes my son happy

For my strength and endurance after Lorraine’s death

For the good fortune of meeting my second wife, RoseMarie

For her generosity in becoming a second mother to my son

For my beautiful wife Abby

For her patience in becoming second mother to my daughter Margo

That the sky is blue

For the seasons of the year, especially the spring and the fall

For the fierceness of winter, which reminds me that this life is passing, even as I approach the winter of my life

For my many abilities, used and unused, realized and unrealized, and the many gifts the Creator of the Universe has seen fit to bestow upon me

I am thankful

That I am not rich in worldly possessions, though I often think that I would love to be wealthy, yet I know that I am truly blessed for not being so

For my legs and feet, which have borne the brunt of my body for these long seven decades, and though tiring, still work

For the sun which never tires of warming this beautiful green planet

For the night which brings rest and mystery to us all

For the great diversity of beings and life on the earth.

For the multitude of peoples, and languages and cultures, for their oneness all

For my faith in a Creator God greater than me, a faith that I have lost and found too numerous times to count throughout my existence

For my doubt in the transcendence of our existence which persists in me even to this very day and for the certain knowledge that I may never know, but maybe I will

For the thought of my own death, that occurs at least once a day every day

For my certain belief that despite the seeming chaos of the world’s situation we as a species are surely being turned toward the Good

I am thankful

For my mind that can think these thoughts

For the brave ones who have gone before me

For those artists and writers, inheritors and begetters of a great tradition, who labored without the comforts of modern life to bring forth their masterpieces

For the explorers who pushed out into the depths and forged a new life for all of us

For the Founding Fathers of the United States, believers in God all, who produced the document that should always guide us, the Constitution of the United States

For the freedom to state all these things, which none of us should ever take for granted

For my life, which is surely a free grace of a gracious and good God.