The University of Thanks (or...Thank U.)

A gifted and hard-working* artist whose work I deeply admire reminded me to be thankful today. I'm really thankful for the garbagemen, without whom I'd have very little to eat, as I've thinned the goat and roast-beef, three cheese chili dog herds of late.

I'm so grateful for my wife for her great qualities, including her low standards for a mate. I thank God for these kids who I can only hope fall irreparably in love with Our Lord. I can't believe the ready kindness that has been shown to me by people of more substance and greater handiwork than I can begin to reflect.**

While I'm thinking of it, I need to tell everyone reading this that they have been invited into a loving friendship with the only living God.*** That is something for which my thanks do not, and can not, end.

*I know she works hard, because I've read it. The gifting is obvious, but so is the work - you know. Picasso was talented, but so was Michelangelo, and Michelangelo also worked like a dog. Yeah. That kind of difference.

**One night, as I squatted, clubbing rats into planks to decorate my sleeping-hole, I looked up at a shadow in the sky. I reached for it sort of absently, and though I had to stretch to reach it, my hand found its rocky surface. I pulled my self halfway out of the hole, but could go no higher. Suddenly, many hands from secret places descended, drawing me higher. I looked around, the shadow-casting rock that I'd been brought to was the loveliest I'd ever seen. Nice and craggy with charming butcher's blade edges.

"Uh, thanks," I said to these strangers in the dark, as I turned to drag the rock down to my tomb. "Thanks for helping me get this rock."

The strangers laughed. "That's not the rock we want you to try for," they said, pointing upward. "That is."

I looked up. I could only see the moon.

***Now you have no excuse.