Thanksgiving Alone

Yup. It's Thanksgiving, I'm alone, and it sucks. 

I wanted to post, though, because I got the idea for the above graphic -- Norman Rockewell's "Freedom from Want" with Xs drawn through all the faces but one. I adore Rockwell's work. I hope he can forgive me.

So, if you want to cheer me up, go to Amazon and order your copy of "Save Send Delete" here. It has gotten good reviews.

What am I grateful for? Or, more properly, for what am I grateful? 

I am grateful for you. I am grateful for computers. I am grateful for the internet. I am grateful for Facebook.

I am grateful for Liron Rubin, and Lukasz, Sue Knight, Danuta Reah, Magdalena Pasnikowska, Sandy, Chris, Jeff, Otto, and anyone else who has ever read or commented on a post here. 

I am more grateful than I can say for ALL of my Facebook friends. You can never have any idea how much your photos, brags, woes, worries, prayer requests, poems, essays, passions and picadillos have enriched my life. 

Thank you, every single one of you, more than you can ever know. 

Let me ask you this one thing. Please keep doing exactly what you are doing. Please keep being passionate about horses, and greyhounds, and cute food, and your newborn premmie, and your broken leg, and being politically incorrect and iconoclastic, and fashionable, home-sewn clothing, and gardens, and Japan, and Islam, and good hair, and painting, and WW II, and the L-8, and football, and space alien abductions, and horror literature, and apple cider from the backyard tree, and scuba diving, and world travel, and women's rights and Obama, and your dog, and Disneyland ... 

You are my favorite celebrities. I wake up in the morning eager to read your posts. I scan them before bed at night. I keep you in my prayers. 

Please keep breathing, please keep shining your magnificent presence into the world. 

Your life warms me. Distant though we are; after all the sun is very distant from Paterson, NJ, but it is blaring through my apartment right now. Just so, you warm me. 

Thomas Merton once said, "There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun."

You've just been told. And I just thanked God for *you.*