I expect that like most families on Thanksgiving, when we sit together around our feast, we take turns sharing something we are grateful for. It can be hard, because, where do you start to take stock: I’m grateful to be alive, I’m grateful you are all alive, I’m grateful for this feast, I’m grateful for you love, I’m grateful our home is heated… it could go on for days, so what we choose can become a bit performative. But it can also be pretty obvious to us in a particular moment when we may have just dodged some catastrophe or been blessed with some gift of grace. I’ve found myself at a bit of a loss for the past few years because every year, what I am most grateful for is obvious and redundant and I hate to sound like a broken record. I ‘m grateful for these two:

It’s may feel little sad that my life has contracted so much as to completely revolve around them, but they trigger such deep selfish-gene juice, and they are so damn delightful, that everything else pales in comparison anyway. The fact that I am so grateful to have lived this long, when I spent the first half of my life fairly certain I would die youngish like my father and both grandfathers, is really sort of a corollary to my gratitude for these little girls, in that I am happy to have just lived long enough to meet them. A little more selfishly in wanting to have a hand in raising them, tho there is also generous component in wanting to make a gift to my earthling community of whatever hard won wisdom I may have gleaned in my time here. They can carry those much further into the future than I can.

Nini doesn’t remember my Mom, Trudy who died when Nini was just 1 1/2, and she of course never met my dad. Rey and Addie never got to meet Gretchen and Deena, their sort of maternal co-grandmas. I knew only my own, Hazel, my other three grandparents are mysteries to me. I’m an odd bird, who has always had a very hard time grokking my own identity, and I suspect relations with Amsia and JD, my grandpas, and Florence, my paternal grandma, would have given me more axes from which to draw the intersecting lines of my identity. Not only that, all humility aside, I feel that my unusually insatiable curious and probing mind has allowed me to amass more than my share of wisdom, for which I have been very grateful that Rey has had the opportunity to absorb some of in this. These days, my biggest fear, and the thing that keeps me going more than anything else, is wanting Addie to also remember my stories and love. She is still so little that her her memories of me may disappear with my passing, depriving her of being able to draw strength from them an to understand some of where she came from. I would love to be around to help Rey pick a college and see her head out on her own. I think i have a shot at that, but really doubt I have much hope of making it to 90 with enough of my wits intact to participate in Addies flight from the nest, But I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to help build this nest for her and I am hoping to get enough more years r that she can recall the strands I have woven into it.

Think on your gratitude. Like generosity, it is a powerful psychological phenomenon, with considerable weight of evidence for its profound benefit in your life.

Happy Generosity &