Let me tell you about last night:

An old friend I have not seen since the mid-eighties contacted me. She was just a friend, but she happened to be part of one of the most significant decisions of my life. I was living in Massachusetts, and we briefly worked together. She told me at the time about a man who owned an eight-hundred-year-old castle in Austria. She was going there the following summer to do housekeeping in exchange for her stay. I wrote the man, Peter, and inquired as to other positions, thinking a summer working in a castle built around 1100 just might be what I needed. He said yes, offering me a bartender job for the summer, and having told him my journalism background, asked if I’d help him edit a book he was writing about the castle.

So it was decided. We bought one-way tickets to Salzburg and decided that after that summer I’d wander south through Europe and on to visit a friend in Senegal. And on. And on. I moved to Pennsylvania to live rent-free with an old college roommate so I could save money for the trip. I even got a job at Hotel Hershey to save more money.

Things happened.

I didn’t go. I called my friend and told her I had decided not to go. She was more than a little upset, to be sure. I had reasons, and I don’t regret not going, but it was significant. The following summer came and went and she did go to Austria. And the following fall she called to tell me all about it. That Thanksgiving, she drove to Pennsylvania where I was then watching an estate for some friends who were spending the holidays in New York City, and we had a fun Thanksgiving Day, and she told me how it was a good call that I didn’t join her.  

Last night for the first time in ages, she contacted me and we remembered that Thanksgiving. Her and her husband still live in Massachusetts, and they’ve also traveled around the world since then. But that Austrian trip was the first jaunt, and we talked about her return, and that holiday in November when she clearly forgave me for bailing on her.  

Crazy. Am I sorry I didn’t go? Yes, it haunts me that I didn’t go. Am I glad that I stayed? More than anything else in my life I’m glad I stayed.

Life is like that, and it’s taken me since then to understand what it means to be grateful. I’m not thankful for some things in my life that changed the course of my existence, but I’m grateful for where those things brought me. They’re not the same thing. No kidding, I never really truly understood. I’ve always been thankful for so much, as I’ve pretty much had so much to be thankful for. But grateful? I’m just beginning to understand.

I sat this morning on the deck at Café by the Bay in the village, swirls of dry leaves moving through with the breeze off the water. The place isn’t on the Bay; in fact, it is a mile or more away, but the breeze moves through town this time of year, and this morning I sat on the deck with the leaves lifting and falling, and I drank my cappuccino, and in my mind ran through a list of things to worry about. It’s long.

It seems more common these days to be distracted by life and its happenings. People you love are ill, or they’re pressing against the edge of unhealthy, anyway. Others have fallen away from keeping in touch, and with the holidays imminent, you wonder how they’re doing, about the changes that find us here, and about the mistakes we’ve made.

I’d like to do the last few years over again. Honest to God, I need to do the last few years over again. And I’d like someone to call me up and say, “Hey, let’s try this again. What do you need to get it right this time?” But life simply doesn’t work that way. So what is to be done?

This:

I’m grateful for being here, now, on the deck of a café, drinking coffee and feeling the beautiful autumn breeze on the back of my neck, talking to neighbors heading in and out, making notes about edits I need to make in a manuscript.

I’m grateful that I just hung up the phone with my ninety-year-old mother, and we laughed, talked about the weather, talked about my cousin’s chickens running through her kitchen.

I’m grateful that my life really is a circle, and all that was true nearly forty years ago is still true and present and alive and such a part of me.

I’m grateful that my son is a reflection of my father, the same gentle spirit, the same deep, deep kindness, the same subtle sense of humor. Grateful that on his way back here from Richmond this morning he is stopping at Country Donuts for some toasted coconut fritters for me.

I’m grateful for so much.

I’m thankful for what’s ahead: more Ireland, more Spain, more western New York and the familiar reaches in Florida. I’m thankful for people’s forgiveness, for those who make excuses for me, for those who understand the subplot behind my eyes.

Recently I wrote about students who have died through the years. Today I’m thinking about the ones who kept going; those I can’t thank enough for tolerating my humor and arrogance as we moved through semester after semester, only to send me a note to let me know how they’re doing. The ones who speak up; hell, the ones who show up. The ones who stop afterwards to talk, who call me up and ask questions, who seem to understand the smallest of gestures have the biggest effects.

I’m grateful that I have siblings who have the same sense of humor, thankful they’re much smarter than I am, thankful they “don’t confront me with my failures.”

I’m thankful for the way the trees hang on to those yellow leaves so much longer than the rest, brightening up the sky, filling up our senses and reminding us we’re alive, and we may wake up tomorrow and begin again.

I’m more than a little grateful for my friends. I’ve known some for more than forty years and still can pick up the phone and call anytime and, in the words of Harry Chapin, know that they “see where you are, but they know where you’ve been.”

I’m thankful for the way the river keeps running past.

For the way the sliver of a moon reminds me of my insignificance, and the brightness of Vega reminds me of my own light that needs to shine on this all-to-brief journey though nature.

Happy Thanksgiving.

“Friends, I will remember you, think of you, pray for you.

And when another day is through, I’ll still be friends with you.”

–Bill Danoff