Expressing our gratitude

Expressing our gratitude

At church we were asked to share our thoughts about the people, places, and things for which we are grateful. These are mine.

Monday

Person:  Liese

I am grateful for Liese Scotton Rhodus for so many reasons that I cannot begin to hope to touch on all of them. Of course, there are all the usual things: she is a wonderful wife, a caring and loving mother to our children, a helpmate, a provider, a manager, a friend, a lover. I am grateful for all of these things, of course, but there are then the things that most folks would not think about: she is an amazing teacher, she has a sense of humor, and she gets me.

My gratitude for her being a teacher might seem odd to some people, but they have to understand that being a teacher is not just a job—it is a lifestyle. The fact that she is so good at what she does is predicated on the qualities that make her such an amazing mother, wife, and friend: compassion, caring, focus, dedication, intelligence. As our kids are quick to point out, she is liable to turn any moment into a lesson, but more importantly, she makes all the moments fit together. She sees the big picture, and she sees how all the pieces fit together.

Having a sense of humor is another quality that might seem incidental to some, but it is the glue that holds it all together for us. As Liese is fond of pointing out to her students, learning—knowledge and thinking—is really all about being able to get the joke. A sense of humor is one of the most significant indicators of intelligence. It also means that one has the capacity for fun. Both of these are things that I value, things that make life better, that fill the moments with meaning—at least for me.

Finally, Liese gets me. I am very aware that I am different, that I am odd, that I do not fit in. And I am okay with that. Liese understands me. She might get frustrated with me at times, but she ultimately understands why I act the way I do. Not that she is always okay with that, but she understands. We all need someone who understands us, who sees the reasons we do the things we do, who can grasp the meaning and the message wrapped up in our selfhood. She makes it okay for me to be me.

Place:  Home

Home is not so much a physical place as it is a metaphysical place. Home is part nostalgia, part family, part love, part comfort, part familiarity. Home is the space where we don’t have to pretend. We can be who we are. Home might be our mother’s kitchen, a place of warmth and love and nurture. It might be sitting in the living room where our father watches UK basketball and John Wayne movies from his recliner. It might the house we share with our spouse and offspring, where we take our meals around a table—or in front of a shared TV show, where we keep our pets and share secrets and laugh and cry and hold one another close. For me, right now, home is a two-story white house on an almost dead-end street, a house that is almost one hundred years old and that is infected with a variety of DIY projects at various stages of completion, a house that has character, both because it is old and because it contains the menagerie that is our family. Our house is a home, in that delightful clichéd way, because we live in it and make it messy with our living. I hope that everyone has a place that can be called home, even if that place changes often, even if that place is not a physical space. We all need home.

Thing:  books

Books take up quite a bit of space in my life, physically and otherwise. Our house has shelves of books, boxes of books, piles of books. We have children’s books and school books and novels and poetry and plays and history books and Bibles and cookbooks and reference books. We have a couple of dozen different editions of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass because I have this life-long love of the words and the silliness and the story that is Alice. We have books that I have written. And then there are all the books in my classroom and in my office. My life is filled with books.

I am a high school English teacher, a person who forces other people to read. I went to school for a long time to study words and stories. I have seen the power of books. I have had students confide in me that books have made them cry. They have told me that books helped them understand the world and understand issues and understand themselves. Some books comfort us, some challenge us, some mock us, some define us. I am grateful for books because books allow me to be me.

Tuesday

Person:  Mommy

Joyce Pennington Rhodus is my mother, and, as with my wife, I cannot begin to enumerate all the reasons for which I am grateful. She gave me life, for goodness sakes. She has always been there for me. She loves me unconditionally. How can I even begin to explain why or how I am grateful?

To begin, she believes in me. I have read a good deal of fantasy, and there is a motif that suggests that characters might blink out of existence if no one believes in them, but I am not proposing that I would cease to exist if my mother did not believe in me—at least, not in the corporeal form. I am certain, however, that I would not be who I am without having had her there to talk to me, to listen to me, to pray for me. She created me, not just from a biological perspective but also as a kind of personality-sculptor—she pushed and prodded and nagged and encouraged, all in an attempt to make me into an acceptable human being. I am what I am, in large part because of her.

In addition, or perhaps by extension, I have my appreciation of books because of her. She still shares books with me that she thinks I might like. However, I have learned much more from her than just books. I am pretty sure that she might be responsible for my sarcasm, and that—as my students, my colleagues, and my friends will tell you—is a big part of who I am. In my world, sarcasm is not so much a tool for attack as it is a kind of defense and a sort of playful teasing. It is yet another way of playing with words. And playing is another thing she gave me: she shared a love of puzzles and games. Hours of Perquackey (one of the best word-games ever produced—go on Amazon right now and get your own) pushed me to see words in new ways.

But the best part of playing games was that we did it as family. My mother engendered in me a sense of family, and that means the world. I was in college before I truly realized that not everyone experiences family in the same way. On an intellectual level, sure, I knew that families come in different shapes and sizes and that not all people are alike, but I lived in a kind of cocoon that insulated me from much of the bad that is all around us. I grew up in a family of love and caring, and I think that my mother was key to that whole construct.

Place:  Berea

Berea, Kentucky, is unlike any other place on Earth. I am sure that many people feel that way about their hometowns, but that is okay. Berea is a small town, which means that people know people; we even knew people we didn’t know. Most places, town characters are anonymous, but in small towns we know who they are, we know their stories. In small towns, we have connections. As a born-again Transcendentalist (at least in a literary sense), I think connections are really important, and in small towns like Berea we know enough about one another that we are aware of the things, important and trivial, that we share.

Another thing about Berea is that it is a college town, but not just any college. Berea College, my alma mater, was established to educate those outside the traditional college target audience: the poor, blacks, women. Berea continues to address the needs of all peoples, and that mission has influenced the town that grew up around the college. Some people see the influence of the college in the arts-and-crafts industry that Berea nurtures, but, while I appreciate that aspect of the town, I am more appreciative of the climate of inclusiveness. Being a rural community in Eastern Kentucky, there are many instances of intolerance, but that does not overshadow the much larger capacity for acceptance that has always been present in this place.

Thing:  seasons

I know a lot of people who want to live in places where the average daily temperature is 85. They dream of beaches and of being able to wear flip-flops year round. I like where I live because we have seasons. I like the variety. In Kentucky, we have cold and snow in winter, we have hot, usually dry summers, we have stormy springs, and we have cool, colorful autumns. Sometimes, we have all four seasons in one week, but I like that. I enjoy all the different kinds of weather. I am in awe of the cycles in Nature. I love watching the transitions from one phase to the next.

Granted, I do have my favorites. I love the fall. I love leaves changing colors and cooler temperatures. But I have my favorite parts of each season, also. I love the new life of spring. I love the snow of winter. I love the warmth of summer. Much of my feelings about the seasons, like so many other things in my life, is connected with school. Fall is the return to school. Summer is the long break from school. I also see the seasons in terms of holidays, with fall and early winter being a succession of Big Days—Halloween and Thanksgiving and Christmas—a fluid continuum of celebrations. And I also think of the seasons in terms of food. I think of the warming comfort foods of fall and winter, the soups and casseroles and crockpots full of goodness. I think of the salads and fresh foods of summer.

Perhaps most importantly, seasons mark our time. I could not be comfortable in a place where all the days were the same. I need the smell of honeysuckle as I walk Celia’s dog. I look forward to the first firefly of summer. I appreciate the signal of change that is the first frost and the joy that is the crocus and hyacinth peeping out at the other end of winter. Seasons, for me, are something to be embraced, something to be celebrated.

Wednesday

Person: Celia

Our second-born, our girl, Celia is very much her own person. She has a very definite sense of what is right and what is wrong, and her ideas of justice and compassion and fairness define her world, for better and for worse. My heart breaks when I see her struggling with the realization that not all people are good and that even those she looks up to are flawed in ways that disappoint her. The recent election-cycle traumatized her as she glimpsed the ugly sides of people on all sides of the political struggle. Yet, even as this pains me, it also makes me love her all the more because it shines a light on the caring young woman she has become. Her values are Christ-centered, and that means that the bigger picture that she sees is colored by compassion and love.

Other reasons that I am so grateful for the gift of this girl include the fact that she very much was a gift. We struggled for almost eight years trying to have a baby, and when Andrew was born, we were overjoyed; however, we were told that we would have to go through the same process to have another child. We accepted that. But God had other plans. I remember vividly the day that Liese came to my classroom door to tell me that we were pregnant. We had not been trying, but it happened anyway, and nine months later we welcomed a baby girl (surprise number one) with a head-full of beautiful red hair (surprise number two).

On an everyday level, I am grateful for our girl who is passionate about things, who loves basketball and art and UNC and science and animals and cooking and travel and dance and softball and clothes and God. She is funny and smart and talented. She can quote almost every line that Sheldon Cooper has ever said, and she can talk about music and movies and books in a way that shows me that her brain works in wonderful ways. She is a keeper.

Place: Raleigh

Many years ago I took a job in a far-away place, and I packed up all my stuff and drove to Raleigh, North Carolina. I was blessed to be placed in a great school and to have a wonderful wise woman assigned to be my mentor. (I miss Marion Sutton a lot.) I learned so much about teaching, but more importantly, I met the woman who would become my wife—and like all good hillbillies, I married the flat-lander and moved back to the hills. But there is much about Raleigh that I miss, and our trips back remind me of those things. By missing things, I suppose, I am identifying the things for which I am grateful. I miss Readers Corner, one of my favorite bookstores in the world (right up there with Shakespeare & Co., which, come to think of it, seems to be the template for the store in some ways. There are other bookstores I miss in Raleigh and the surrounding area (the Triangle being an entity so closely tied to any of its three corners as to be inseparable), and there are other stores, though, sadly, many of my favorites are gone. Still, there does not seem to be anything for which one could wish to shop that cannot be found tucked into some corner of the area.

Beyond the stores, I miss the food. I miss having Bruegger’s Bagels nearby, a place that understands the bagel and knows how to do a smear. I miss seafood, as our recent return to Mayflower Seafood reminded me—piles of fried goodness fresh from the Atlantic and served with hushpuppies (that, through no fault of the cooks, could never be as good as my Granny’s). I miss Sidestreet Sandwich Shop, just down the street from the house Liese and first rented; Sidestreets made lovely, large, tasty sandwiches, and this was where Liese and I had supper with my extended family after our wedding. Raleigh has great Greek food, amazing Southern cooking, and just about any other kind of food on the planet. And then there is Char-Grill, the home of the amazing Char-Grill burger, and a slaw dog from Snoopy’s.

Thing: Food

Years ago there was a cooking show on PBS, The Frugal Gourmet, featuring Jeff Smith, a minister and foodie, which unfortunately got cancelled when Mr. Smith became part of a scandal. Whether the accusations against the man were true or not, he had a philosophy about food that I have adopted: food is a celebration. He talked about meals as a way of connecting with people, but also as a way of connecting with other times and other places. I like that.

I like food, and anyone who has seen me can see evidence to that fact. I am a gourmand. I am not a gourmet. I do not have the sensitive palate to appreciate stinky cheeses and animal organs. I like what I like. Much of that stems from nostalgia—my comfort foods are many, and most of them fall into the Southern cooking genre: fried chicken, biscuits and gravy, chicken and dumplings, soup beans with corn bread and onion. (I asked a group of high school students once about their comfort foods, and way too many of them responded with Pop Tarts.)

As much as I love Southern food, I also enjoy trying new things—what my kids’ pre-school teachers called making a new food friend. I was in college before I had Chinese food, and now I crave it on a regular basis. Thai came later, to the same effect. Mexican, Italian, Greek, Cuban, Middle Eastern, Indian all have made themselves at home among my taste buds, and I cherish the times I can indulge these various hungers. But, if you notice, most of these cultures share one thing with my own Appalachian heritage when it comes to food: in all of these, eating is a shared experience, and it all connects with Jeff Smith’s idea about food as celebration. Eating is good, but eating with other people makes the experience even better. Food connects us. The things in food nourish our bodies, but the emotions and memories in food nourish our souls.

Thursday

Person: Andrew

For Halloween a few years ago, Andrew shaved the top of his head, made himself a fur beard, put on a sweater vest, and became his English teacher, who happened to be me. I was thrilled, honored, humbled, happy. But Andrew is not a Mini-Me; he is so much more than I ever was at his age. Andrew Scotton Rhodus, our first-born, has always been a charmer. We have a picture of him when he was about one year old, a mischievous smile beaming from his eyes, and that is how I usually think of him—full of fun and possibilities.

Andrew and I can talk about comic books, about movies, about television with an energy and an enthusiasm that does not usually enter into our conversations. We share a love of story, especially as it plays out in make-believe universes of intricate design. We also share a love of jokes, and that includes playing with words. When Andrew was in kindergarten, he came home one day and asked, “Daddy, can you speak sarcasm?” I said that I could, and now he is pretty much as fluent in the language as I.

As I said, Andrew is far beyond what I was at his age, and this is especially evident in his social skills. He is a good kid, and he has always had a good group of friends. He makes friends easily. He is accepting and supportive. He has an easy rapport with others. For a couple of years, he has worked with elementary school kids at school, first as a teacher’s aide on his off-days from a college class he took in high school and now as a student-worker in the after-school program at school. The kids love him, and he has a way of working with them that is at once nurturing and authoritative.

Andrew is a good person, and he has a good heart. He is fun and funny, and I feel blessed that he is my son.

Place: Richmond

Growing up, I paid little attention to our county seat, twelve miles away from my comfortable little hometown. I had some aunts and uncles and cousins who lived there. We occasionally went there to go to a store. Later, in high school and college, I would go with friends to the movies. It was the place with bars and liquor stores, things not found in my dry town, and so it was a place of danger and bad decisions. As I got older, I discovered a couple of reasons to visit: Recordsmith, my favorite place for music and a nameless used bookstore. It was not until I left the state and returned, taking a job in this town that I began to appreciate it.

Richmond is a college town, and many of the businesses cater to that audience, which is why we have so many chain restaurants, I suppose. However, it is also a rural community. An overheard conversation by the pool at the University country club almost perfectly captures Richmond: a group of high school girls sitting nearby were talking about the PACA ball (a local debutante event that is a major fundraiser for the local hospital), discussing dresses and dancing and hair, and at the same time they were talking about going frog-gigging. It makes me happy.

I appreciate Richmond because of things like the Christmas parade, an hour-long procession of floats and marching bands and horses and antique cars and cement trucks festooned with strands of colored lights. I am grateful for the farmers markets in the summer, providing tomatoes and white half-runners and corn for those of us without gardens or green thumbs. I am thankful for history and tradition and connections that larger places have misplaced or forgotten.

Thing: Trivia

Some folks collect coins or stamps or Blue Willow china, things that take up space and cost money, and I have my own collections that fall into that category, but the main thing that I collect is trivia. I hold on to useless bits of information. I share these with people generously—more than generously, according to some people. My wife and kids are the primary recipients of my sharing, and they are pretty gracious about it, but I do understand that I probably can get annoying with it.

Every day during the school year, I write on my old-fashioned chalkboard a list of that day’s birthdays; the list includes writers, artists, actors, musicians, historical and scientific and political figures, and anyone else I deem interesting enough for notice, including the students in the high school. I am always interested to see which names the students recognize. I do my best to share with the students who is who. Today we talked about the Mobius strip because it is the birthday of August Ferdinand Mobius. It was fun.

I think I like trivia so much because, not only does it help me answer a lot of questions on Jeopardy and in the rare games of Trivial Pursuit, it also helps me do that thing that helps me make sense of the world around me, it helps me make connections. Trivia is the connective tissue of knowledge. Big Ideas are wonderful, but without the trivia to help people see and understand (and care), it is all just words.

Friday

Person: Dana  

When I was in first grade, my mother was pregnant. I was not really all that aware of what was going on, but I think I understood that we were getting a baby. As the time neared, I came down with Chicken Pox, and so I went to stay with my Mammaw until I was safe to be around the new arrival. I remember hearing the news that I had a baby sister and celebrating in first-grade jubilation. I was truly happy to have a little sister, and I still feel that way.

My little sister and I, like most siblings, are very much alike and very different. She is the grown-up in our family. She is the gregarious people-person. I appreciate her for her differences and for our similarities. I am grateful that we share a sense of family and that we have the same love for God and His Creation. I am thankful that she has a sense of humor and common sense—two of the senses that seem not to have evolved in some people.

I am thankful that she takes such good care of our mother. It is a kind of symbiotic relationship, but she is always there when our mother needs her. She is also always there for my kids. She is the doting aunt, and she has spoiled them since they were born. And she is always there for me and for Liese—and for anyone who needs her. She is nurturing and caring and giving, and she makes room, makes time for her family and for her friends and for people she does not know. She is a worker, and much of her work is as part of groups that take care of others. I may be the big brother—chronologically and physically—but she is the one I look up to.

Place: Kentucky

Perhaps I relate to Kentucky because, like me, Kentucky exists on the fringe. It is not really Southern and not exactly Mid-Western. It is its own thing. And that thing is an amalgam of pieces and parts—the mountains, the Bluegrass, the small towns and the cities, the family farms and the horse farms. It is a heritage of Jack Tales and literary giants, of Bluegrass music and avant-garde art, of technology and tradition.

Though I do not drink, I appreciate that Kentucky is the home of Bourbon because the converted corn is, by all accounts, a kind of art unto itself. Kentucky conjures images of thoroughbreds and basketball. Kentucky, for me, is a place of friendly people who would be willing to help anyone in need. Kentucky is a place where people ask who you are kin to and where you are from because they understand the importance of family and of a sense of place. (As I point out to my high school freshmen, Homer had the same understanding, as he illustrates in the first words Odysseus says in introducing himself: I am Laertes son. I am from Ithaca, the best place.)

Kentucky is one of the most beautiful places on Earth. As a friend of mine from grad school opined long ago, in Kentucky even the weeds are pretty. Driving through the countryside, hiking in the hills, gazing across a lake, all these become transcendent activities because all of these expose us to the glory of God’s creation. Maybe it is just because I grew up here—maybe everyone feels this way about their home states—but Kentucky is comfortable for me, it offers up things that my soul craves: beauty in its myriad incarnations.

Thing: Games

One of my favorite things we do as a family is playing games—not just because like the games but because we laugh, we share, we have fun together. We play board games and card games, games of chance and games that require skill and/or knowledge. We especially like the games that make us think. We love word games—maybe not as much as I love word games, but still. We like games that let us be creative. Games let us be competitive in acceptable ways. Games let us bond in new and different ways.

I play lots of games. I play Words with Friends on my phone (and my wife often kicks my butt) and I play Trivia Crack. I play Candy Crush on the computer, and I play Jeopardy against the people on TV—not nearly as much pressure for me, but also not as money. I do crossword puzzles and Sudoku occasionally. Games amuse me, and, while some people might think that I am wasting my time, I think of it as honing my facilities. Maybe I am wrong, but at least I am having fun.

Saturday

Person: Daddy

My father, Eugene Rhodus, died in 1992, twenty-four years ago, just three days after my wife and I moved to Kentucky from North Carolina. I miss him so much, much more than I might have imagined. I especially miss that he did not get to see his grandchildren and they did not get to meet him. He loved kids. He loved life. He loved laughing, and one of my favorite memories of him is an image of him standing in the hallway entrance by the kitchen at my grandparents’ house with his head thrown back, his mouth wide in laughter. I have no idea what triggered the laughter—it could have been a story, a practical joke, even a noise. He found humor all around him, and when he could not find it, he made it.

My father worked all the time. When he was not at his job, he was doing the things he enjoyed at home: growing his gardens of vegetables, working around the house, doing yardwork, fixing things. Work was his relaxation. I could not keep up with him. When he took a break, he had a cigarette—he smoked three packs a day until about a year before he died, when he quit cold-turkey—and he had a cup of coffee. My dad drank coffee all day long, all year long. When he came in from working in the summer heat, he had a cup of hot coffee. I miss that.

My father worked because he enjoyed it, but he also worked to provide. He took care of his family. He made sure that we had the things we needed (if not always the things we wanted). Though we had to live frugally, my father made sure that we lived large. I remember when he came home from a friend’s farm with some tomatoes to put up (can)—fifteen five-gallon buckets of tomatoes. We had canned tomatoes, tomato juice, ketchup, salsa, barbeque sauce enough to last us all two years. My wife still talks about the evening, when we were first a couple, when my dad went to the store to get ice cream for an evening snack; he came back with four flavors of ice cream, bananas, chocolate syrup and caramel sauce and strawberry topping, whipped cream, nuts, and cookies. We had the best sundaes ever made.

I miss my father. But I am blessed to have had him, and I hope that I might be passing on just a little of him to my kids. They would have loved him too.

Place: bookstores       

Not all bookstores are created equal, but all of them, even the bad ones, have some redeeming quality; after all, they all have books. Bookstores are sanctuaries, places set aside for those of us who need words. They are places where we can find escape and find truth and find anything and everything. Good bookstores understand their purpose and their power.

For a bookstore to be good, it must have books—lots of books, of all sorts. Some bookstores try to cater to a particular segment of the population, and they have their place—Christian bookstores, comic book stores, craft book stores. But these are not the same as a good, well-stocked, multi-facet bookstore. I am personally fond of used bookstores, probably because I am poor, but there is a charm in reading books that others have held and treasured before.

I am grateful for these places where I can search for hours to find a book I have been looking for or, even better, a book that I have never heard of. I savor wandering from aisle to aisle, from the poetry section to the children’s books to the cookbooks to the novels, picking up random books and finding passages that speak to the moment.

I have already mentioned Readers Corner in Raleigh, North Carolina, as one of my favorite bookstores. I really miss Wittington’s Books on North Limestone in Lexington. The thing about these two places, and the thing that marks the difference between a good bookstore and a great one, is having people working there who know and love books. One of my former students came to me when she was still my student to tell me about finding her very own Beatnik—she had gone to Joseph-Beth Booksellers in Lexington (which was one of my favorites) and meeting John, a grad-school friend of mine, who worked there (and probably did qualify for the honor). Book people understand each other, and they usually have good ideas or suggestions or observations.

Thing: Beauty

I suppose that what I am really grateful for is not so much Beauty as it is the ability to appreciate beauty. This morning I saw a glorious sunrise; I had taken Celia’s dog out for his walk, and the sky was pink and orange and red, and I had to call to Liese and Celia to look outside and see the beauty for themselves. One year, long ago, I led a class of college freshmen out from our classroom to see a tree in the throes of autumn; only a few of them seemed to appreciate the spectacle, and this made me sad. Our world is filled with wonders, and those who do not possess the ability to appreciate such things are to be pitied.

I know that much of what I am talking about is trite, clichéd, the stuff of high school journaling, but I still love it. I am grateful for all the beauty that I can find, and I am grateful that I can see it—or hear it, smell it, touch it, taste it. Beauty is not limited to one of our senses, though we usually think of it as a visual thing. We think of the sunrise, the sunset, the ocean vista, the scenic overlook in the mountains, and all of these are amazing and beautiful. So are the sound of a baby’s laughter, the smell of fresh-baked bread or of honeysuckle, the touch of a snowflake on our cheek. Beauty also comes to us from things man-made: a painting, a song, a quilt. Our lives are so full of beauty, it is overwhelming, and I am so thankful for all of it that I can begin to notice.

This makes me think of two very different passages in two of my favorite works of literature: in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Christopher tries to explain to the reader about his Asperger’s by pointing out that when the average person might see a field with cows and a few buildings beyond, he sees the exact number of cows and what each looks like and he sees the individual buildings, what color they are, how they are arranged—he sees it all, and all the detail is overwhelming. In Our Town, Emily realizes after she dies that people do not notice much of their lives. Both passages suggest that there is so much that we do not notice, either because we cannot see it or because we choose not to see it.

I want to see it all.

Sunday

Person: My students

I realize that this may be cheating since I have not chosen a specific person but instead a class of people (pun sort of intended). I am not a really social person. It is not that I do not like people; I am not a misanthrope. I am an introvert. I have friends—more acquaintances than close, BFF-types, but I can bond with other humans. However, the person that I want to talk about happens to a few hundred people.

Students are amazing creatures. They look very much like human beings, but they are so much more complex. They are grown-ups and little kids all at once. They have all the same emotions, feelings, characteristics as anyone else, just in abundance. They can be the most joyful, energized, enthusiastic person and in the next breath they are melancholy and despondent. The most wonderful thing about them, though, is that they are filled to overflowing with questions. They have a deep-rooted, almost essential need to know things. They do not always ask questions, but when you can get them to begin, it is hard to get them to stop—but please don’t try. They want to know, and that is what makes them so special.

I was just visited by two former students. They are both now successful adults. I am sure they are delightful people now because they always were good kids, and that kind of things tends to stay constant. They reminded me that, though I tend to think about all my former students as being the same age as my current students, a perpetual fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years old, they do in fact grow up and move on. I experience their lives for just a moment—I have them as students for just a slice of their individual big pictures. Even so, they all make an impact on me, they all leave memories and many of them teach me things or help me see things in new ways. Having students is one of the best parts about being me, and I look forward to many more.

Place: Earth

I am thankful for the planet that God made and placed me on. All of creation is amazing. The whole planet is filled with wonder. I have never been anyplace that has not offered something that has made me stop and give thanks—mountains and oceans and deserts and forests and plains—it all has something special. And God has filled this place with plants and animals and people, all different, all beautiful, all worth our attention.

The planet may seem, like my students, a bit of a cheat, but it should not be overlooked just because it is so big. As Walt Whitman said, “I am large, I contain multitudes,” and that same idea applies to our world—the variety that exists here makes life interesting and makes living here an adventure.

I have read enough science fiction over the years to know what some of the options of a planet to live on might be. Think about Tatooine, the desert planet where Luke Skywalker grew up; I am thankful that, though we might have deserts, our planet has so much more to offer. There is a similar planet in Frank Herbert’s novel Dune (and there are movies, but they are not nearly as good), a desert planet; however, Herbert’s planet is desert because of abuse of the environment, which reminds us that being grateful for things often means that we have a responsibility to take care of those things. Call it stewardship.

Thing: Music

My wife will tell you, without hesitation, that I cannot sing. I make noises, mostly joyful, but no one would mistake my efforts for music; however, I love music. My life is filled with music. My wife figured out that she loves me at a Richard Thompson concert. My son listens to the same music now that I was listening to at his age. My daughter and I share many current musical favorites. I connect with many of my friends through our mutual love of particular artists. (This year has been particularly hard on many of us, from Bowie and Prince through dozens of others to Leonard Cohen and beyond.)

Music makes me happy. It salves my soul when I am depressed. It makes me nostalgic, connecting me to memories, to people and places and events from my past. It makes me dance. (I cannot dance, either, but play “Blister in the Sun” and I don’t really care.)

Music also connects me with God in ways that prayer or reading or talking just cannot. We are blessed at our church to have so many talented musicians. We are treated on a regular basis to singing and playing that moves me, that makes me feel. Music has that kind of transcendent power. One of the strongest feelings I have had of the presence of the Holy Spirit was at the Kentucky Theater when The Blind Boys of Alabama filled that place with ecstasy.