I Am Saying Thank You
It is Thanksgiving morning and we are standing at the window talking to Richard and Justine, who have called us from Colorado. There’s a bowl of tangerines at Monte’s elbow, the aroma of coffee, that good sense of a new day beginning. Outside, cows are grazing peaceably, and a robust coyote is strolling about. I see the steep muddy path leading to a grove of trees high on a hilltop, and I once again silently resolve to walk up there someday just to stand and look out.
“All our souls are connected,” Richard is saying. It’s the familiar voice of a dear friend: a raconteur, an inventor, a builder of bikes and airplanes and even a few comic strips, and a true disciple of wonder. It’s getting cold in Colorado, but instead of nostalgia for days gone by, we talk about heading east for a visit when the season is right, and Richard muses about showing us the lay of the land from above, in his airplane, a plan I am happy to leave in the realm of fantasy.
We tell them about the bald eagle we saw a few days ago high in a tree, and they tell us about Ricky, an orphaned baby quail they found and rescued, who is now a confident member of their family. Suddenly a sound clip comes in of Ricky’s varied and outrageous utterances, and we hear him chirping and cooing in our kitchen, and once again, I am charmed and dazzled by the implausibility of everything.
The day is still unfolding, blossoming, almost. I embark upon a solo stroll along the road that skirts the driving range. The green shimmers, and golf balls are flying wildly in all directions, and I hurry past with my head down. I detour to walk through the crunchy brown oak leaves that have accumulated along the curb, a tangible and auditory memory of East coast autumns.
Later in the day, we stop at the house of a nearby friend whose daughter is home for the holiday with her husband and new baby. Long ago, when I was a middle school teacher, this daughter was a student in my class. Now she shares a little anecdote that fills my heart with gratitude and love, most surprisingly because it is a memory with me in it. We were on the 6th grade camping trip, she says, and everything was new and strange, and she missed her parents and couldn’t sleep. I invited her to come outside with me, and we sat side-by-side on the cabin deck, and I pointed to the sky.
“See those stars?” I apparently said. “Those are the very same stars shining on your parents right now.”
“I was so comforted by that,” my former student says now, nearly twenty-five years later. “I’ve never forgotten it.”
She shared some other memories of our middle school days, and it was a bountiful Thanksgiving gift for me, because it was such an affirmation, a retrospective validation that I was a good teacher, and I am remembered fondly. The funny part is, she couldn’t recall specific factual things we learned in class, just the feelings and the experiences. We wrote a lot, of course, and this was the class with whom Donna and I launched the great Solar System project, a tale I will re-tell another time. But there was also silliness, and there were odd, touching moments.
“Like when George Harrison died,” she said. “Someone brought it up, and we talked about it, and you didn’t make it seem unimportant.”
It was certainly as important as anything else.
“Or when we were in 8th grade, we stayed in Treebeard’s Lone Pine cabin and watched the movie, Tremors, and then he took us to the Alabama Hills at the base of the mountains, where it was filmed. How amazing was that?”
Well, that was Dunn Middle School. The Camelot years. I could tell you stories. And I will. But I digress. The point here is that I always felt like an imposter, inadequate somehow, and now I was thinking that maybe I was okay.
“I never knew how to be a teacher,” I once confided to a friend who was also a former teacher. “I was just being a person.”
“Exactly,” she replied.
And I’m still doing that, or exploring what it means, so perhaps in some inadvertent ways I’m still teaching, and I’m definitely still learning. In any case, it’s a true gift to be lovingly remembered by a long-ago student whose life you briefly touched.
So Monte and I were sort of making the rounds on this day of thanks and giving, and we went back to our neighborhood and joined the gathering hosted by Geoff and Joey, a lavish feast and a happy chaos of toddlers and dogs and family and friends.
When we got back home, I turned on my computer, and—voila!— it was a cornucopia of communication. There were emails and texts of the sort I love to get, messages with the feel of real letters, greetings and good wishes from people in our lives.
Someone sent W.S. Merwin’s magnificent poem of thanks, which concludes:
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
thank you we are saying and waving
dark though it is
I love that poem, with all its pain and contradiction and sincere defiant gratitude. I remember the rainy night when I heard Merwin reading in the auditorium at UCSB, how he channeled something ancient and luminous and absolutely necessary, and a kind of grace descended upon us.
Yes, I was there on that rainy night, enveloped by the spell that Merwin cast. Imagine that?
And once again, I thought how generous and extravagant my life has been, and how unlikely.
I carry the sadness, too, of course. That never goes away. But I still see the same stars my loved ones saw, and sometimes it seems that we are here together, looking up.
All our souls are connected. I know this for sure.
And I have begun to see that blessings come from unexpected sources, rolling towards me randomly, flying around like golf balls.
And I am saying thank you.