A Reason for Thanks

It is nighttime and family has settled in.  All that can be seen of the day’s festivities are footprints in the snow – a whole gaggle of them – running parallel to the sidewalk, as I imagine a random stranger trying to cipher exactly why a whole group of people would have walked some distance in the deep snow rather than on the clear sidewalk . . . and I smile.

The snow footprints are the only evidence of a family gathered and gathering, the last official task of the day the obligatory family photo, when we all donned our winter apparel to go outside for this year’s pic so we’d get the adjacent mountain in our background.  Everyone save our grand dame, my mother, walking beside her in the snow to take our respective places for that caught-in-time moment that is the family picture, like so many we have of times and memories and people gone by.

And should our own descendants some day look upon this photo and wonder about us, they won’t know save from handed-down tradition of our repast . . . they won’t see all of us gathered round as each took a turn reading aloud from The Day the Crayons Quit , clapping at the end of each turn, claps turning to cheers as our agreed story-telling master Mary Beth lends her particular blend of interpretive humor to the mix, all of us listening intently and patiently as new reader Rowen takes his turn. . . they won’t remember all the good news shared, the quiet conversations had into the night, the wee boy ‘teaching’ an older cousin how to play his own favorite computer game.

And there, in the middle of our family picture is a small dog being held by a small boy and they’ll wonder, I suppose, about the dog – a visitor grafted into a family moment simply because she was there – and isn’t that grand?

They – those descendants I imagine into being on a cold almost-winter’s night, won’t remember . . . but we will.

And that is good and good enough and reason and reason enough for thanks.

Guilty Thanks

Yesterday, driving the interstate a few car lengths ahead, the black pick up truck must have slid on some ice at the other end of the bridge.  I watched in horror as it slapped into a right angle to the road even as my foot went to the brake as my mind screamed don’t brake!  Do not brake!  at the same time it is responding if you don’t you’ll hit him!

These things happen so fast you can’t know for sure – but I think it was more the car’s abilities and technologies than my own that stopped our own slip into skid, but the pick-up truck was not so fortunate.

For a brief instant I thought all would be well as the truck simply faced into the median, but inertia had other plans and the truck propelled into the median, which has a steep middle.  The truck flipped onto its top and into the opposite lanes.

The driver (we think his name is Gary) was thrown from the truck onto the roadway.  He was alive at the scene as best we could tell, but his injuries were severe.  His mother managed to crawl out from under the smashed top.  She didn’t seem to be hurt, but she was in shock, so it’s difficult to know.

Several folk, we among them, stopped to render aid and as is so often the case, some who stopped were people with the needed skills – a fireman, a nurse, and others.  Cell phones become the blessing of the moment as people are able to call quickly for help.  All I managed to do was to silently pray, which is not nothing, but feels at the time so little.

Often have I heard folk speak about those who slow down passing an accident with scorn.  But I think it’s nothing nefarious or nasty.  I think they’re slowing down to make sure there’s help.  And to say a small, whispered, just-a-little-guilty thanks that it wasn’t them, for how easily it could have been.

We’re praying for Gary and his mother this Thanksgiving Day as we hope to hear news of whether he survived.  We’re saying our own (guilty) thanks that it wasn’t us this time.  And we’re giving thanks for firemen and nurses and random folks with tools in their trucks ready to be used to help at a moment’s notice when a stranger lies on the pavement fighting to live when, just moments before, whatever life he led was heading down the highway blissfully unaware of what was to come.

Life is so tenuous as well as so precious, with each moment offering no guarantees of another.  And so it is, for all the moments that have passed, I give thanks.