A heavy heart at Thanksgiving

My glass is half empty. Sometimes it overflows, even as I reflect over the seasons of life’s pleasantries and also its sorrows. I learned to be thankful. It did not come naturally for me.

I can still hear Mama say: “You can look at the glass as being half empty, or half full.”

I can still hear Grandmother’s voice — wise, gravelly and sweet, like sandpaper and honey. “Be grateful. . . . There once was a man who complained because he didn’t have no shoes until he saw the man who didn’t have no feet.” I have shoes. “As long as I’ve got shoes, to put on my feet, food for my children to eat . . . Everything is gonna be all right. . . . Everything is gonna be all right,” I can still hear the sunshine band in their angelic- white choir robes, singing inside my grandparents’ Pentecostal church. I have food. Back in those days, when I had no money, no job and no prospects, I sometimes took counsel in my mother’s living room, tears streaming down my face as I told her I felt like less than a man for being unable to properly provide for my family. How it hurt that I couldn’t afford to buy my children shoes when their toes were corned from shoes too tight.

How ashamed I was that I couldn’t afford a bicycle, let alone a car. And that if I had died or gotten killed, I wouldn’t have left my family anything, except alone.

“If all your problems are money problems,” Mama used to say, “you don’t have any problems, John. You can always get more money.”

The years have passed. I’m not broke anymore. I have a house, cars, a Harley, two bicycles; other creature comforts from having worked and sacrificed. The American Dream.

And yet, as sure as the cold wind blows, I sense a numbing chill deep within my heart and soul. A sense of loss that makes my steps heavy, as if walking through a winter’s storm with wind- driven icy snow stifling each step.

It taunts me for the time I wasted worrying about stuff that didn’t matter. Haunts me over mo- ments missed or not fully cherished. Chides me for time forever lost. For every word spoken in haste or too harshly.

It wails in my ears like a Miles Davis slow, melancholy jazz song. Transports me — like the Ghost of Christmas Past — to the days, places and faces that filled my life when I was still learning the lessons of gratitude and far too consumed by the drive to get more. To come up. To gain all that the world tells us ultimately will yield happiness. I’ve learned: That money can’t buy me love. That stuff doesn’t matter; people do.

That you get this thing called “life” — and only so much time and so many things to fill it up with.

That tomorrow is not promised. Life is to be lived. And time does not heal all sorrows.

I still miss the smell of my grandmother’s peach cobbler at Thanksgiving. The sight of her joy as our family spills through her doors. I miss my mother’s garlic fried chicken and her girlish anticipation upon the arrival of Thanksgiving, knowing that Christmas is weeks away.

The other day, I wished that I could call them — hear their voices, one more time. But there are no telephones in heaven.

So in this season of Thanksgiving, my heart is heavy and my glass, some days, seems half empty.

Even if I know the truth: that it is at least half full. I have memories. And I choose to be thankful.