You do not need a holiday to be thankful

It doesn’t have to be Thanksgiving Day for a man to offer thanks. And when I heard Friday that Jim Rebman had died Nov. 21, the day after his 96th birthday, I gave thanks that I had known him.

He had been under the weather recently, but it wasn’t in him to complain.

Jim was a cheerful guy who loved a good laugh and always made the people around him feel better. Knowing I was once a sports writer, Jim would always greet me with, “Hello, sport.’’

He had stories to tell, too, including a hilarious one about getting kicked in the shin by a horse he once owned. Painful as the experience had been, Jim managed to make the telling of it humorous.

At a gathering of family members on Thanksgiving Day, when all of us were listing the things we were thankful for, someone observed, “you know, there are things that happen to us just about every day that should cause us to be thankful.’’ That is what I thought of on Friday when news reached me that Jim had gone to his final resting place. I’m sorry he died, of course, but thankful that I knew him.

While I’m thanking, I’m thinking of . . . During the summer, in the Market 32 parking lot, I found my car with a dead battery. I called Gary DelMonte at Gary’s Hilltop Auto Repair on East Main Street. I had misgivings about making this call, because Gary’s place is always a motorized beehive. I don’t know a busier man (or a better mechanic), but I did not want to wait for Triple A.

“Give me half an hour or so,’’ Gary said. Twenty minutes later, he pulled up in his pickup. Two minutes later, the jumper cables had done their work and DelMonte was following me back to his garage. Twenty minutes after that, I was headed home under the reassuring power of a new battery, having taken a sizable chunk out of Gary’s day, during which he dropped everything to come to my aid. Was I saying thanks, or thinking it, on the way home? I don’t remember, but I’m backing up and doing it now.

A couple of weeks ago, I pulled into a little shopping plaza and parked in front of the Grog Shop at 349 Winsted Road. “Hey, mister, your left front tire is mighty soft,” a man called to me as I dismounted. I looked. It was. I stood with my hands on my hips, looking at the offending tire. Suddenly, out of the Grog Shop stepped its proprietor, Nelson Gonzales.

I’ve known Gonzales since well before he moved his store from across the street in the Big Y Plaza to this location some five years ago. The amount of business I have given him is minuscule and my visits there are few and seldom.

He bent and put his ear near the tire. And then, “I hear no hissing sound, so if there’s a leak, it’s very slow,’’ he said. Nelson walked across the small parking lot, opened the trunk of his own car and returned with a pumping device in his hands. He handed me a cord with a special plug on one end. “Plug this in to your cigarette lighter,’’ he said, and proceeded to attach the pumping device to the tire’s valve.

In short order, the tire pressure had returned to the proper reading and the tire was no longer soft. Nelson gathered up the pump and the cord and returned it to his car. Returning, he listened one more time to the tire. “Nothing,’’ he said, adding, “I’m thinking you might have hit a curb the wrong way. But have it checked.’’

That’s exactly what had happened. Unsolicited, Nelson Gonzales had done me a great service, because my tire-changing days are over. I know I thanked him. I’m thanking him again.

I don’t often see granddaughter Rachael Canfield, who lives in Boston. Friday afternoon, she called. “Grandpa, I’m in Torrington. Can I come out and visit for a while?’’

She had a bit of time and wanted to see and talk with her ol’ Grandpa. She walked through my doorway and kissed me a good one and we talked and talked and I got caught up on all the goings-on in Boston. And when she left she gave me a big hug, huge, and I said, thank you, dear granddaughter for visiting. Thank you.

Every day, it seems, there’s something. You just have to watch for it.