I Don’t Have Time to Count My Blessings
by Drew Holmes
This Thanksgiving finds us on a road trip to visit Jamie’s family. The boys do not get to see them very often, so with Timothy off school this week the opportunity was too good to pass up. Yes, we will end up spending as many days on the road as we will visiting, but the boys like to ride in the car, and two days of driving is a welcome opportunity to get away and reset before the final rush to 2022.
For Thanksgiving eleven years ago, I was on a very different road trip with a very different head space to reset. I was recently divorced and not too sure what the future would hold. My world was unstable at best, and I needed to get back home, the place (as Robert Frost said) “where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” I drove across the country, visiting scattered friends along the way, eventually arriving in Massachusetts, the state of my birth.
In the months leading up to this holiday my grandfather was in increasingly poor health. He and I always shared a special bond. Growing up he would call me “Pal” as often as he would use my given name and I learned from him the intricacies of machines and how things worked. He stoked my natural curiosity, something I still have to this day.
On Thanksgiving Day, I picked him up at the nursing home and brought him to my parent’s house for dinner. I remember that though the weather was not terribly cold, he was chilly, so I put my winter coat on him, helped him into my car, and drove to the house. I have celebrated Thanksgiving in many different states (and once in Thailand), but Thanksgiving in New England has a different feel to it than anywhere else. It is a part of the DNA of every native New Englander. That trip gave me just what I needed, the reminder of who I was and where I came from, a solid foundation on which to rebuild.
Three months later I would return to Massachusetts for his funeral. Because he served in the Army Air Corps during World War II, an Air Force honor guard was present at the church service. I served as bugler in the detail, playing taps for him on the trumpet he gave me while I was in high school. When I first chose to play the trumpet, I had no way of knowing where that road would take me. Thankfully, it permitted me the opportunity to give him the military honors he had earned.
Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. I like the idea that we as a country take pause to count our blessings and to give thanks for the good things in our lives.
I know that if I stopped to count every one of the blessings in my life, I would scarce have time to do anything else.
As we celebrate this Thanksgiving, I know how lucky I am to have Jamie and the boys. The life we have built together and the amazing things that have happened were unimaginable eleven years ago. And that is worth pausing to give thanks.