we have decided that it is important to be grateful, and often. it's easy for feelings of gratitude to get lost in the shuffle. so here is our solution: every thursday we will give the world the opportunity to post an open thank you letter on the blog. you can say anything you want! say thanks to your favorite elementary school teacher, or say i am grateful to be here and be healthy, or say thank you nature for making trees so tall and climbable! just go nuts!
please post your thank you letters in the comments. post fifty times if you want; there are so many things to say!
5 comments:
here is the email i sent to my favorite teacher:
i hope that you still have this email address.
today is the first day of my new weekly thanksgiving, which will happen every thursday. i have decided to write my first thursday thanksgiving letter to you! here goes:
dear dr. sacks,
i am writing to you today to say thank you. i am hard pressed to think of many people in my life, past or present, who have shared so much with me and have had such a positive impact on my life. in a lot of ways, you have helped to shape me, and i am happy and proud to be the person that i am, now more than ever.
thank you for teaching me about all kinds of different things. i still think about these things every day. like the balance between possibility and necessity, for example, and i remember the time you told me about your uncle and his crazy schemes and how he never finishes projects. thanks for being the first person to give me a copy of "nausea," even though i couldn't read it then, because i would've had to sacrifice too much naivete. see? i am still very naive, because i might have spelled that wrong. there are so many other things. like, "the being is the being of a being." remember how hilarious that was?
i think that you really instilled in me a desire to learn and create. because of that, i am a better and braver person. it is essential to always be brave.
so thank you for being my teacher and my mentor. i still consider you to be these things. you have had a very powerful and positive impact on my life. you have helped equip me with the tools i need to explore the world, outer space, and a lot of dreams. you are a better teacher and a better person than you probably realize.
i hope that this letter finds you happy and healthy and full of ideas, because you deserve all of those things.
so this is my thanksgiving.
from,
erin riley williams
So OK at the risk of heaviness here's a Grateful Thing that will probably start off sounding like an Awful Thing but damn, stick with it, ok, because it actually has a happy ending, despite being ripe with what would normally sound like terribleness. In order to make it easier I'll skip through the bad meat of the Grateful Thing in one breezy sentence:
Three years ago my father, who is absolutely amazing, was diagnosed with a sort of fast-acting acute leukemia, a disease that you probably know mainly from your local bodega, which might have one of those "leave a quarter to help this cute, dying kid" boards up; this caused my father, who has never smoked in his life and is basically the least cancer-prone person you could imagine, to have to become entangled in an immediate chemo regimen, later followed by like 3 months passed out cold and unconscious on a breathing tube, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.
It's getting better. Right. here.
In the summer of 2004, after a lot of wrangling and thanks to some fucking great insurance courtesy of my school teacher mother, my father was given a bone marrow transplant. We didn't know where it came from at the time. The bone marrow looked a lot like marinara sauce. Actually it looked EXACTLY like a bag of marinara sauce from the sort of retail restaurant I used to work at, which was Red Lobster. For those who don't know, bone marrow transplants are no longer painful or medieval operations. It's kind of an anticlimax; like a blood transfusion using thicker goo.
Anyway.
Most people immediately following a bone marrow transplant do a bad thing, and that bad thing is known as "them dying." I'm grateful, for one, that my father did not die, and that in fact he continued to live, and is still living, and if one cares to consult statistical odds on a medical graph (which I don't anymore), the point he's at in his not-dying qualifies him for, you know, an appearance on Oprah. If he was so inclined, which he is not.
About two months ago the international bone marrow registry was able to put my father in touch with the 30-something German woman whose donated immune system is letting him not-die. So yeah, I'm grateful that in September of this year this total German stranger will be flying in, with her little suitcase of remedial English, to spend a week at my parents house; and that I can, with the rest of my family, have one of the biggest WHAT.THE.FUCK moments at the airport waiting for her, this weird anonymous lifesaving German female.
That's a good thing. Also known as : too much information.
I am celebrating Thanksgiving Thursday by thanking my receptionist for making me giggle when I feel like throwing staplers at my boss. She is close to 80 and loves taking ballet classes & still dreams of being a fashion designer. I would like to thank her for sending out mass office emails with "Homeless Documents" as the subject every single work day. She is a rebel who wears her "sneaks" and refuses to take any sass from the suits. Thank you Andrea aka Andy for kicking so much office ass.
Thank you Dr John Kellog and George Bayle for the invention of Peanut butter. I enjoy it daily.
I am thankful for Lasell College because I never would have met the amazing Robin Mapes otherwise.
Go LASERS!!!
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