Thankful

OPINION — Last week I was poking around in my office trying to come up with an idea for a Thanksgiving column, which is not easy after 28 years of Thanksgiving columns. After a while it’s hard to come up with something I haven’t already said about any subject, and holidays are particularly challenging, since they come around every year. There are only so many ways to say ‘special time,’ or ‘family and friends,’ or ‘restraining order.’

But maybe that’s what’s good about holidays. The faces change over time, and maybe the locations, but holidays like Thanksgiving still manage to evoke a recurring feel, a constant theme of connection to the past, a familiarity forged through blood, marriage, and the dog throwing up on the living room rug. A bond that weathers time and distance, overcomes the pain of divorce and food fights over political disagreements, and brings us together with people we avoid the rest of the year. What a blessing.

Past Thanksgivings always seem brighter in memory, don’t they? We used to be more cheerful, more forgiving, less likely to call the police on the neighbors for setting off illegal fireworks inside the city limits. The turkey was bigger when granny was still with us, the kids behaved better before video games became de rigueur, and the dessert table was more inviting when people still used real sugar and real butter in everything. But then hindsight is never really 20/20.

Back to me poking around in my office, reflecting on how unfair it is that I should have to write something new about something old every year and make it sound reflective and nostalgic. Scanning my bookshelves, I ran across a couple of titles I’d forgotten about, written by a friend I couldn’t forget if I wanted to. Morris Gresham was writing about the outdoors when I was in Jr. High, and we became friends when I joined Texas Outdoor Writers Assn. in 1997. When Morris wrote his first book in 2010 he sent me a digital copy and asked if I’d write a blurb for it. I’d never written a blurb, and consequently botched it badly. Que sera.

A blurb is supposed to be a few lines of praise for the book and, if possible, the author. The idea is to make him or her sound like a cross between Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway, with a little John Steinbeck thrown in. Nobody reads blurbs, and if they do, they don’t believe them. It’s propaganda, but it’s required propaganda, and writers all throw them in, regardless of integrity or honesty.

My blurb was too long, because I got carried away, because I knew Morris and I really liked his book, and I didn’t have to make up any fluff. And when I sent it to Morris, he liked it so much he used it as the foreword of the book, instead of a blurb. And it got me in trouble with my mom.

The book was called, ‘Coming up a country boy,’ and it was about life in the 1940s and ’50s, and it made me remember by own childhood during the ’60s. So I wrote about that, about visiting my grandparents’ farm in McCulloch County, swimming with my cousins in the concrete reservoir my grandad built behind the house, climbing the mesquite trees in their yard, and sleeping on the screen porch. So far so good.