Like most of you, over here we have much to be thankful for, even if we don’t have everything we want. Included on our list are good health in spite of old age, plenty to pay the bills (and then some in spite of inflation) and a gaggle of children and grandchildren who work hard and strive to love one another.
This year, perched at the top of my own gratitude list, though, has to be the image of our seven-year-old granddaughter, who has struggled mightily all of her life with Cystic Fibrosis and who endures daily treatments and meds and shots and the periodic hospitalization. This Thanksgiving, this child was walking around a potluck supper gathering with a spiral notebook and a pen. She was asking everyone who would speak to her (and she is pretty hard to miss with curly red hair) what they were thankful for and then writing that down in her notebook. My heart is certainly full.
In the circle that is our family, I am thankful our grandchildren are being taught already about gratitude. In a larger context, I feel especially hopeful that our nation has set aside one day a year to teach the art of giving thanks. While we love to indulge in our turkey and stuffing and jello salads and football on the fourth Thursday of November, we do also have to admit this is pretty much our ONLY national day of remembering that we are thankful.
Certainly, not everyone insists everyone at the table say somehing they are thankful for before the gravy is passed, but a lot more of us do that on Thanksgiving than on any other day in this country, so, there’s that. Moment of gratitude for our moments of gratitude. You know it carries over. While we were thankful for one another ON that Thursday, on the next day, the Friday, BLACK FRIDAY, we are grateful that we shared our gratitude, that we said it out loud. That’s not all, though While on Thanksgiving we talk about being thankful, our gratitude on the day after Thanksgiving is different.
…our gratitude on the day after Thanksgiving is different.
Sure, we might be thankful that we didn’t have to wait an extra three or four hours for the meal because the yams wouldn’t bake or the rolls wouldn’t rise or the last visitor was late. Or, maybe we are thankful the custard pie “stood up” or that our teenaged grandchild still hugs us or that a chair or two that had been empty too long was filled again for, oh, so many reasons. On Black Friday, we often find that our gratitude has evolved and perhaps even grown significantly. I, for one, have found that I now need to include Black Friday itself on my gratitude list and not because I could, if I wanted, go indulge my shopping habit.
In the past, though, I would say I loathed Black Friday. IMHO, Black Friday was as annoying as Christmas songs being played before Halloween is over, setting up your Christmas tree before Thanksgiving or, yes, the overuse of acronyms. (See above.)
Now I have to admit that Black Friday is the unsung hero of the weekend and perhaps is to be credited with keeping Thanksgiving on the calendar.
Think about it. Thanksgiving on its own struggles to stand out among the fall holidays. Really, other than the nearly extinct cornucopia, there is little to distinguish the holiday. As one comedian put it, there is only one Thanksgiving character and we hunt him down, kill him and eat him. There are no costumes really except those Pilgrims and only one or two songs we sing at school assemblies or maybe in church. A media search for images brings up mostly pumpkins and leaves and maybe a Pilgrims coloring page.
Really, other than the nearly extinct cornucopia, there is little to distinguish the holiday.
I would posit that Thanksgiving itself needs to be grateful for Black Friday. What a boost to Thanksgiving that so many workers get Friday off, for example. Think about it: the whole shopping craze means employers would be hard pressed to take Friday back and make folks work because of the economic bump from Black Friday sales. Without Black Friday, Thanksgiving might fade quickly, becoming that holiday with the funny hats and too much food we used to celebrate. And then where would our national thankfulness be?
Black Friday is the unsung hero really of the weekend, right?
So, this is a bit of Black Friday gratitude (maybe Gratitude with capital “G?”) Thank you, Black Friday, for protecting and preserving the one day a year we all at least think about why we are grateful. I will no longer begrudge you the shopping and endless ads and mayhem and Jingle Bells onslaught. I will no long even complain about the early decorating or the Christmas items that appear on the shelves before Halloween.
We Need You, Black Friday.
Hang in there. Without you, Black Friday, we might just go straight from Halloween to Christmas after all. Without you, I might never have realized how much hope some folks need and derive from all that early decorating, shopping and singing. Most of all, if we did not still have a designated day of gratitude, I would not have this memory to treasure of a seven-year-old, who in spite of the fact tht she was counting down the days until her next dreaded blood draw, was asking total strangers to share their gratitude with her. So, thanks to all that helps us keep this day of Gratitude around, especially Black Friday. I am shopping already for a cornucopia for next year just to do my bit to help keep Thanksgiving (and its protector, Black Friday) around.
Was your gratitude list different after Thanksgiving this year? Leave a reply and share your gratitude today, too.
Some of the mementos from my backpack. Ever wonder why you held onto some and not others?
As stories go, this one is incomplete, like a puzzle missing some corner pieces, or a picture torn, by accident, of course. It’s my hope that through this process of unpacking my backpack of memories, I’ll locate those missing puzzle pieces or that torn corner of the picture and all – or at least more – will make sense.
Some years ago, I went looking for, or at least information about, my teacher from third grade. I’m sad to say, so far, I haven’t found her, though I am pleased to report I’ve found some folks I’d lost track of some decades ago. As the child of a father who moved us to new cities – and even new countries – at least every three years, I certainly have felt disconnected. For the longest time, because I also was estranged from my family, there existed no one in my life who could vouch for me ever existing prior to college. No one would say, for example, “You were always the tall one in the class.” No one was ready and eager to remind me that I was always late for the traffic patrol crossing guard duty – dear God, they let us do that in sixth grade then! No one would raise their hand to verify – or deny – if I were accused of being teacher’s pet (I sure wanted to be.) or if I had read every historical biography in our primary school library. (I had!)
Thorpe J. Gordon Elementary
I attended Thorpe J. Gordon Elementary School in Jefferson City, Missouri, from the last part of second grade until sixth. We arrived after living overseas for a couple of years (There’s another couple of items from the backpack and a few more stories for another cold day). Today, though, I am seriously regretting tossing all those class pictures a few years ago. You know, the ones where we all stood on those metal risers and tried to hold still long enough for the photographer who counted it a win if he could get us all looking at the camera when the bulb flashed. (If you have pictures from Thorpe J. Gordon Elementary in the mid-sixties, by the way, I’d love to see them.)
To the best of my recollection, my teacher when the year began was a Mrs. Peterson (sp?). She was young, pretty, energetic and fun, and we all loved her.
At least that’s how I remember it, but then, for the longest time, I remembered this as happening in second grade. Since I didn’t start Thorpe J. Gordon until after Christmas in the second grade, seems like some memories got fragmented and some pieces indeed might be missing. We do all have somewhat mashed up, muddled memories, don’t we? I don’t know about you, but whether they are from last week or our childhood, my memories toy with me.
In my mashed up memories, Mrs. Peterson was lively and pretty and cheerful, which was amazing because she was married to a Soldier. Mr. Peterson was, at the time, serving in Viet Nam. He was at war. We didn’t know why he had to be at war but we knew she didn’t get to see him or talk to him much and he wasn’t at home when her day was over. We knew too that he was a pretty nice guy because, every time he sent a cassette-taped message to his wife, he included a message for our class. In return, when Mrs. Peterson was preparing her own cassette message, she allowed us to add some greetings and questions. Sometimes, much to our delight, in the subsequent message, he answered those 8- and 9-year-old’s questions. We felt special and connected and heard, both from him and from her, something most children could not say in that generation, to be sure, and something that, sadly, would not last.
Christmas Corsages
That year, just like every year I can remember, we were off of school for two or three weeks for Christmas break. Before the break, at the class Christmas party, we’d all given Mrs. Peterson our Christmas gifts. The practice in the mid-sixties in the cold, gray, windy midwest, or at least in our neighborhood, was to give your teacher a Christmas corsage; these were pretty, often fake flowers (or no flowers at all, if I remember correctly) and they were adorned with ribbons and trinkets. They certainly were festive. The trouble, as far as I could see at the time, though, was that everyone gave the teacher a corsage. How many dang corsages could one teacher wear? So, I opted that year to give the teacher something else, likely some candy or perfume; it made sense to me, but the gesture did not pass without incurring grief from several of my classmates.
A Typical Christmas Corsage
Over time, I would become more accustomed to classmates wondering what on earth I was thinking. In fifth grade, for example, a couple of us created a class-wide crisis when we did not wear dresses on picture day. Whoa. (Strangely, we were allowed to wear pants in grade school at that school; later, I’d transfer to another town where girls were required to wear dresses, no matter what the weather.) What some of us had figured out, though, was this: when we wore a dress (with nice shoes) for picture day, recess was a wash and we really, really liked running and climbing during recess. In addition, the individual pictures were only head and shoulders so a pretty blouse would serve the same purpose as a dress. Finally, at least in my case, since I was the second tallest kid in the class, I always always stood on the back row for the class picture anyway so no one ever saw what I was wearing. I could see no reason to endure the discomfort of the dress and patent-leather shoes all day when I could be in pants and tennis shoes. Sadly, I had to explain that about twenty-five times that year and, while I was annoyed at that, I was more annoyed at myself for not figuring this out in first or second grade. Still, embracing my generation’s dictim “Question Everything” was a learning curve, and the Christmas corsage might be considered the first volley in my war on ridiculous expectations.
No Questions Allowed.
Still, this post is about war, war and children.
That Christmas break, we went home a happy lot and looked forward to returning in January. When we did step back into that classroom, we did not find Mrs. Peterson at all. What we found was another teacher, an older woman whom I’m sure was a lovely and gifted teacher, but on the first day back to class that frosty January, we were told simply, “Mrs. Peterson is gone and this is your new teacher.” End of discussion. No questions allowed though you know we had plenty. In my child’s memory, our anger and questions were dismissed, sent to the corner, not allowed.
Now, if any of our parents heard about this from us or if any of them knew what had happened or reached out to the school with their own questions, I don’t know. I don’t remember if I had any conversations with my parents about this either. I can reliably tell you that they were not advocates of my budding proclivity for questioning everything.
It would be decades later when some of that memory came into focus for me; I would realize, belatedly, something must have happened to Mrs. Peterson’s husband. Perhaps he was injured, or killed; we could hope, even, he simply returned home to the states and they were transferred or moved. We never knew though and no one ever told us, which meant our imaginations would have been allowed to run wild if it hadn’t been made so clear that there was no room for that. For me, those banished questions would not surface again until, as a Campus Minister, I began working with students who were combat veterans.
(Lazarus Project, which started as The Lazarus Project, became Soldiers And Families Embraced. The free counseling program began in 2010 as a United Methodist Campus Ministry project to help combat veterans and their families who were attending Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tennessee, adjacent to Fort Campbell, Kentucky. By that time, the US had been at war for nearly a decade, but much of burden of fighting was borne by less than 1% of the US population and felt then quite keenly by their families.The program expanded into the entire community as we began to hear from veterans and family members from all eras who needed to process their pain, grief, anger and ask their questions.)
The name “Lazarus Project” was inspired by the idea that when the biblical Lazarus emerged from the tomb he still had the trappings and stench of war on him and the community is told by Jesus to “go to him” and unbind him that he might live again, rather than wait until he asks for help. See John 11, especially John 11:38-44. We started with peer support groups for veterans and their families and evolved into a full-fledged counseling program offering free counseling still to those affected by wars of all eras.
One part of the program for several years involved joint retreats to find healing from war, and one of the first activities in those retreats involved introducing yourself by sharing some symbol of your experience with war.
Back to the Second Grade
As I prepared to go to my first retreat, I was at a loss to share any personal experience with war until I was cleaning out a drawer and stumbled upon an award I received at the end of sixth grade from the American Legion. It was not until I was holding that award that I realized my own experience with war began in second grade with Mrs. Peterson.
It was not until I was holding that award that I realized my own experience with war began in second grade with Mrs. Peterson.
Certainly, this award, which, I was sure was going to my classmate, Karla, did not – in my sixth-grade mind – have anything to do with war.
American Legion Award given each year to one boy and one girl in the sixth grade of each local Elementary school for “Courage, Honor, Leadership, Patriotism, Scholarship and Service.”
Holding it all those years later, however, gave air to a mass of memories. To my surprise, the memory of Mrs. Peterson and her Soldier were near the top. Processing those memories in that retreat, sorting through the confusion and child’s anger, I am grateful to say, helped the Lazarus Project and then SAFE become community educators about the effects of war on children. The first thing we taught was that children DO know about war, whether we adults want to admit it or not, and denying their experience has both immediate and longterm consequences.
Already, one of our first clients for counseling had been an angry child, a six-year-old, who had been expelled from school for stabbing other children with pencils. Her grandmother came to us asking for help. The child’s father had been deployed into combat three times for a year at a time since she had been born and her mother had melted under the stress, grief and fear of all those long deployments. All that the child knew was that now Mommy also had “gone away.” The child was angry and she had lots of questions no one could answer. We learned quickly that she was among the many children of that war and so many other wars who wake up wondering if Daddy was still alive, if Mommy would be able to come home, and if, when they did come home, they’d be “all right.”
“You lied,” he said. “You all lied.”
A ten-year-old client of our program.
One of the saddest days of our program was when a child whose father had sustained a serious Traumatic Brain Injury declared that all the adults around him were liars because they had all told him Daddy would be okay, and he did not need to worry. You lied, he said. Like most of us adults who want to protect the children, the adults in his life underestimated his ability to grasp the seriousness of the situation and discounted his need for honesty and his right to have the chance to grieve the possibilities and air his fears, too.
All of us at Lazarus Project were amazed, though, at how much it helped the six-year-old just to have an adult hear her and assure her that of course she was angry and rightly so. She desperately needed someone to normalize that anger. Being able to ask her questions without upsetting everyone else around her didn’t fix the situation or mean she wouldn’t need more counseling to understand and name her feelings but it did help her stop stabbing other children with pencils. Allowing her space to air her questions likely had the added bonus of helping her process them before they became jumbled fragments tossed into a backpack that might not be opened for decades, if ever.
As the wars continued, more and more resources surfaced to help talk about war with children. Sadly, as those wars continued, there were children who had spent their entire school experience, twelve years or more, with one or the other parent deployed into combat zones. The questions they have and the feelings they need to process will continue throughout their lives.
Our questions don’t always need answers, just air, the air to breathe, the chance to be counted.
As I write this, I think of my granddaughter who is only seven and, while she seems quite young, she does know about death and she has dealt with the losses of animals and people she has known. Thankfully, she is blessed to be surrounded by adults who allow her to ask questions, even if they don’t have answers for her.
It’s not easy to hear her questions some times, but it IS simple. What we are learning by listening is that our questions don’t always needanswers; they do need air, the air to breathe and the chance to be counted.
Full disclaimer: I love the ocean. I will likely write about it often.
I breathe better when I am near the ocean. I flourish when I am warm and can bury my toes in the sand. I used to feel guilty about wanting to be at the ocean all of the time until I finally found others like me. People used to call me lazy when I talked about how I was looking to find work near the ocean, near the beach, near the waves and the driftwood, as if only being willing to brave the cold and wind and aches and stiffness of winter made you a responsible and mature adult.
Suffice it to say, the ocean will be one of the topics I will write about here. Perhaps some of my unpacking thoughts will speak to you.
If you have ever tried to body surf, or even if you have ever been knocked down by a wave, you know how powerful waves can be. I have sported my fair share of bruises earned when a wave has knocked me down. Some waves are so powerful that they will send you tumbling back onto the beach, rolling and rolling head over heels until you lose momentum, as if you were Jonah spit back up onto the beach by the whale, as if the ocean were done with you and wanted you out.
Grief can bowl us over as if it were a wave. Once it initially recedes, we may struggle to stand again even as the water, powerful and relentless, rushes back out into the vastness of the ocean.
Perhaps you’ve experienced this, trying to stand again while the sand and shells and rocks and debris under your feet sinks and sucks your feet into the muck.
Strange to anticipate grief but smaller instances of grief are warnings of the power of grief to come. Nothing to do but to attend to the moment and focus on the feel often the knees- sin and hands-sinking in the shifting ground under me.
Too often I cannot recover enough balance and find a sure enough of a foothold to raise myself above the next wave that often quite rudely washes over me and requires me again to seek some sure footing. What I have found, though, is that, too often the only answer is to sit in the sand and swirling waters and take a breath as the grief washes over me.
Try not to gulp, I warned my granddaughter, when she was learning to body surf. Keep your mouth closed; If you scream at the wrong moment, you will know what anchovies taste like.
When the grief and swells are too strong to fight, they recommend you curl up in ball and not fight the current of a rip tide. If you are in shallow enough water, you may find the surf still to strong to allow you to stand. In that case, just sit. After a moment, there’ll be a lull in the swells and a chance to right yourself and get onto-your knees again, then your feet.
When I was a child, my brother, my sister and I were introduced rudely to the tyranny of waves. Beautiful and calming from a distance, exciting and great fun when you know how to ride them, the swells of the ocean came as a rude surprise to my siblings and I. Aged five, six and seven, dressed in new outfits for travel overseas, my father directed us to chase that wave back into the ocean for a photo op with his brand new SLR. We’ll never know if he was aware of what would happen; he’d never admit it but the youngest of us didn’t realize soon enough and the resulting photo captured her shock of the cold and surprise at the wet as a wave swept over her. To this day I don’t remember who grabbed her to keep her from falling fully into the wave. True to our family, though, dynamics, she’s never discussed the moment, never indicated even if she remembered it, never revealed whether or not it was traumatic or simply a not so pleasant memory.
I certainly remember the look on her face, the question, “Why did you let this happen?”
“Why didn’t you warn me?”
Most days, memories of my childhood are simply like the gentle wake of the outgoing tide; they lap at my toes and remind me of how far I have been blessed to come from those days.
Most days, I recognize that the memories, after years of work, are harmless, never gone but not threatening to knock me down and no longer able to sweep me out into the deep.
Most days, the memories are not so powerful, now, though, as is often the case with trauma victim, on occasion the wave that washes over is certainly chilling and a shock to the system.
As an adult, I camped one weekend on a beach in Big Sur California, with a friend, a fellow soldier, a Captain in the unit whose members wore a green beret. Overlook for this anecdote the fact that we were not allowed to date, a Private First Class (enlisted) and a Captain. He was, for me, I realize now, a protector, safe and able to navigate dangers that still frightened me. He was also I realize as I write this, a warrior who decided to become his own protector first. I am sad to say I will probably never know now what trauma drove that for him. We might have been able to help one another more consciously had we been able to share. As it was, we were simply a refuge for one another for a time.
After a bit of a hike, we discovered, on that trip decades ago, a driftwood shelter on the beach, perfect for two of us to sleep inside and so we took shelter during a gentle rain and slept peacefully. Until morning. Slightly before dawn, I awoke to his arm suddenly over me, directing me not to move, holding a bundle of clothes over my head (I know now that was to keep them dry.) I am, to this day, amazed at the training that enables that kind of quick thinking, by the way. As the chilly wave receded, he jumped up, scrambling out of the shelter and further up the beach before the next wave overtook the little shelter, me his willing shadow.
Aware of the chill that would quickly set in, he was, true to form, able to build a warming fire for us and dressed me in the (oversized for me) warm sweater he’d managed to grab as wave had first washed over us.
These two events share more than the cold waters of the Pacific Ocean off of northern California. (That first experience occurred on the San Francisco Bay).
Together for me, these experiences mark a formal progression to an awareness of choices, choices in how to live, how to parent, how to love, choices it has not seemed that either of my parents ever reached themselves.
My father had been a boy scout and became a boy scout leader but never shared any of what he’d learned about safety, precautions or survival. His guiding principle seemed to come from early poverty, both poverty of resources and poverty of love. My mother once declared that no one ever taught her how to take care of herself so her children could just figure that out themselves, too.
I am grateful I realized I did have choices.
For the longest time, I thought my only choices were to be like one or the other parent. I am grateful to this day for a doctor who said simply, there is more for you than the life you live at home. You will have other choices, entirely different choices, she said. Because of her simple statement, I have lived learning to expect and then accept those choices that could help me survive and even thrive in spite of the waves that have periodically threatened to wash over me in life.
The choices I have discovered have been for my own “upbringing.” I am the first to acknowledge that I have been slow to mature emotionally, but that was not from lack of effort. My choices have also been about how to parent i.e., whether to repeat my parents pain and pass it on, as they did, or try, albeit likely still lacking, to teach my children at least something about self-care and caring for others.
Sometimes the self-care is just about sitting still while the sand and shells and swirling waves threaten to pull you down more and certainly do not allow you to get to your feet right away. Sometimes the self-care is to admit you cannot yet stand. Sometimes the self-care becomes caring for others as you teach them how to sit still in the grief and the waves and even sit still with them, teaching them to power of sharing the moment and the powerful self-care to be found in caring for one another.
Emptying The Backpack 
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