ALAN writes:

I am very grateful to have been a child in a place and time when the older generation still had substantial common sense,  good sense, and moral fiber.

Every year on Thanksgiving, we went to visit aunts and uncles or they came to visit us. Everyone dressed up, never casually. The men talked about football. The women presided over the kitchen. Thanksgiving Dinner was always a wonderful feast, served at the dining room table on a white linen tablecloth. I was always the youngest one there.

In those days I was too young fully to understand the meaning of Thanksgiving. We were expected to be thankful for what seemed to me at that age ordinary things. I could not figure out why we should be thankful for ordinary things, ordinary settings, ordinary days. Years would go by before I did figure it out. I attribute that degree of unawareness partly to childhood inexperience, but also partly to my having been part of a pampered generation of children. Of course long after those boyhood years ended, I realized that we should be thankful especially for the people who made all those seemingly-“ordinary” things possible and for the hard work they did to make those things ordinary. The bitter regret is that it is not possible today to  express that gratitude to the people who deserved it most but who are long gone; made bitter by the simple awareness that today I am much more grateful for those people and those things than I was or could have been in those early years.

I am grateful for the carefree days of childhood when childhood imagination had not yet been assaulted and battered into shreds by TV screens around the clock; when children could read and dream and create their own adventures in the rich realm of imagination; when our particular neighborhood and our city were the principal concern of our elders, not the nation or the world.

I am grateful for the joys of summer days and the warmth and comfort of my childhood home on winter days; for the sounds in those years: The restrained conversations, the quiet at home, and the melodies of beautiful music on radio, television, records, and in motion pictures.

I am grateful most of all for parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles who lived by a code of moral standards and judgments that were not up for negotiation, debate, or compromise.

More than 55 years ago I developed the bad habit of writing letters to newspapers.  It did not enable me to win friends and influence people, but it proved most helpful for losing friends and acquaintances.  It was the old and inevitable choice: To think and write–or to be popular?

The Thinking Housewife is an Internet variation of a newspaper, in the best tradition of independent journalism.  I am very grateful to its publisher-editor for posting many of my essays and many other appraisals of contemporary life by people who choose to think instead of parrot.  Happy Thanksgiving to Laura Wood and her loyal readers.

Please follow and like us: