Many thankful memories …

Like so many of you, I’m sure, every new Thanksgiving Day that I’m blessed to experience conjures up so many memories of happy times.

Fond recollections of my mother and grandmother toiling and teaching in the kitchen as they crafted feasts to celebrate family and friends. Mama’s giblet dressing that would have made Anthony Bourdain weep in appreciation; Grandmother’s chocolate pie that, to this day, I’ve never found duplicated anywhere.

All of us sitting around that big table, holding hands for the prayer of thanks, Daddy sometimes in uniform because police officers rarely got the day off, and a sister or brother squeezing your hand to emphasize the thankfulness we all felt, the joy of togetherness so many of us sometimes take for granted.

When I lived away from home and couldn’t be there, which only really happened a couple of times over the years, I’d close my eyes and remember just how special this day was and give thanks in a different way, typically punctuated with a call home to let them know I was thinking of them and wishing I were there.

With each Thanksgiving the memories increase and the separation from loved ones becomes more profound, especially that empty space left by the ones we’ve lost, an empty chair that will never again be filled.

Without a doubt, it has been Thanksgiving that brought, at least to me, the realization that no matter how lean or lonely my situation might have been at the time, there were scores of people who were facing a day of sadness or fear or even starvation and that it was up to people like me to try to do something about it.

Service to the less fortunate was something instilled in me by my parents and grandparents who would do whatever they could to help the less fortunate. My grandmother gave away more than she kept from the bounty of her little farm out past the airport, my father would quietly and anonymously help procure toys and food for the poor, Mama would do all she could, typically through our church, to help those caught up in misfortune.

Thanksgiving Day, pretty much all my life, was far more than food and football and parades on TV, but there were occasional traditions to expand the celebration. A ‘Turkey Bowl’ touch football game in Lumberton, a skeet shoot in Anderson, S.C., a first-look ride around town to see the early Christmas lights triggered by the ‘official opening’ of the holiday season.

As we get older, many of us include a visit to a cemetery or a trip to a sanctuary to light a candle, because we cannot and must not ever lose those wonderful images that Thanksgiving Day granted us.

Happy Thanksgiving, y’all.

May all the love in your life surround you and remind you that you’re blessed probably beyond your own imagining.