Thanksgiving

I know, it's been over for almost a week - but today is the first time there has been time to think about it all that hard.

I've been alive almost 68 years - and I guess, considering the number of dead people I know that I should be most thankful for that, and I am. I'm grateful that I can still work and that there are folks that value what I can do.

I've been married for almost 42 of those years, and can still remember the good old single days, and have to concede that they weren't all that great. My wife is a very patient lady, and puts up with a lot, but she's still here, and together we have three good kids, some grandkids and will have another before too long. I can still be musical under the direction of my wife, and enjoy the experience.

I'm still riding my motorcycle, and proved this past Sunday that I can still pick it up if I need to, not that I wanted to know that....

I'm grateful for our families - for our parents who are long gone, for values they instilled in us, for experiences involved in growing up in a small town, for siblings and cousins aplenty, for summers in the Pittsburgh area with cousins and friends, and for shared experiences with neighborhood friends.

I'm grateful for all the ladies that have entered and left my life over the years, even though sometimes things ended badly - each taught me something of value, and I cherish the memories of all of them. I'm particularly grateful to my wife - she has put up with a lot over the years, and has been supportive through good times, bad times and truly horrid times. I am not a perfect person, and she has grown pretty good at overlooking that fact.

I am grateful for having served in the Air Force. My enlistment may have been triggered by a fear of the draft, but the experiences, education, and travel that that four years brought were a large piece of my education and maturing process. I enjoyed what I did in the service and would go again in a heartbeat. I appreciate our troops, support them, and get a wee bit irritable when I hear them denigrated - those who speak ill of the Service as a career and of those who choose to make it a career are fools at best. I recommend to everyone exiting high school that consideration be given to a term of service. I went in at 19, was single and rather aimless, and it gave me experience and purpose - and taught me at least 200 things I never in my life wanted to do again!

My gratitude for family influence gets greater with each year - and as I grow older I am amazed at just how much my father and grandfather knew that mattered - and how much many better educated people knew that didn't matter. My brothers and I each went our own way and survived the experience, learning all the way, and we are still civil to one another. I wish one brother was on the east coast instead of where he is - as we grow older we find it harder to get together on any regular basis, although when we do it seems that conversation picks up where it left off, and the time between meetings disappears.

My father and his brother were two very different people - and I am grateful for having been able to get to know both, even though Uncle Bob was in California, and we were not. I have traveled for work some of the places I have been employed, and family that wandered to California have always welcomed me when I was able to get to their area. Uncle Bob was the person who introduced me to Disneyland, a time I'll never forget, when I had first returned from a prolonged stay in Germany.

The time in Germany was something I'll not soon forget - learning the land, the people, the language, and exploring on my motorcycle. There are people I met there who are still with me, even though I've not seen them since 1966; learning experiences that could not be repeated anywhere else, and lessons about people and places that I carry with me.

All in all, it has been interesting so far, and my gratitude goes out to people without number who have helped me, counseled me, commiserated with me, taught me things, introduced me to exotic foods, different languages, and other ways to look at the bits that make life interesting, and to my various family members, without whom it would have been really dull!

Thanks, all of you - you have helped shape what I am today - take credit for the best parts, and blame the worst parts on my humanity.

Happy Tuesday, everyone!