Okay, here goes my gratitude project. I had originally planned Day One to be January 27, the 20th anniversary of my father’s death. I thought a year of exploring the meaning of gratitude, and more, of practicing it, would be a fine way to honor my father and if I’m lucky, to call to myself his qualities of patience, equilibrium, and curiosity.

Route 40, or Kenbridge Road (locally pronounced Kem-bridge), used to be the prettiest approach to Blackstone, Virginia. At least that’s what we thought, but of course we lived on Kenbridge Road.

My hometown, Blackstone, Virginia, was full of characters, quirky ones, like those you’d meet in a Eudora Welty story, with names to match, like Puny Nash, Walkie-Talkie Robertson, Boosey and Dice Cobb, Shooney Beach, and Tootsie and Truly Orange.

Recently, I walked past a little ravine in my neighborhood where a pack of coyotes had reportedly made their home. I stopped and looked at it, crummy little in-between place that it is, and thought that there’s exactly where I would’ve played as a child. 

Mrs. Bevell was a very nice lady.  She and her husband, Charlie Bevell of Bevell’s Hardware in town, built a nice brick house next to ours the summer of my fourth-grade year.  At first I felt a tiny bit suspect of townies moving in next door and cutting down trees, but when they dug out the basement and piled the dirt up into a mountain in their backyard, all was forgiven.  A ten-year-old can do so much with a mountain of dirt.

I loved my fifth-grade teacher, Miss Borum.  She was young, she was beautiful, and I had never had a young or a beautiful teacher before.  But at the end of the school year, she married a guy named Steve, and that just seemed wrong. What’s worse she ended up with a stepson, also named Steve, who was a stuck-up jerk.

Daddy used to say “there’s nothing wrong with just sittin’ and lookin.’” I know that makes him sound awfully country, like hillbilly country, but he was anything but.  When he said it, he had a little twinkle in his eye, probably thinking of his mother, a stickler for elocution. In fact, Daddy had a beautiful way of speaking, in phrases that seemed drawn straight out of the nineteenth century. 

I grew up in a small town in rural Southside Virginia at a time when the middle class was alive and well. We had our share of poor people, a whole lot of middle, and not a single super-rich person. Pretty much everybody drove a Ford or a GM car, both sold at local dealerships, all made in America by union workers.  I don’t recall ever seeing a Mercedes Benz or BMW in town.

During the Roaring 20s, while others were drinking gin and doing the Charleston, my grandmother Mother Shellie was teaching sixth grade, rearing two children, churning butter, chopping the heads off poisonous snakes, harvesting figs, pears, peaches, and scuppernong grapes and preserving them in some manner, tending her worm bed, doing all the things a mother and a farm wife had to do, and memorizing a piece of scripture or poem every day.

Dr. James S. Harris was the beloved son of Blackstone, Virginia, a doctor who made you feel better the second you saw him, a baritone with a voice like velvet, and a man who made being good seem like the most natural thing in the world.  He sprang into every room and situation, his face all smile and delight, rubbing his hands together like a person does before digging into a feast, in anticipation of whatever wonderful or trite thing he was walking into or thing he was expected to do, a tad late always and always welcome.

The summer of my senior year of high school, my father, who was the tightest man there ever was—he once handed me a dollar bill to buy gas—shocked us with his idea that we celebrate all our upcoming life passages by going to Europe together. He was retiring from his job as a tobacco grader with the US Department of Agriculture, Mama was retiring as the minister of music at church, Walker was leaving his job teaching at Emma Willard School and headed off for a year of study at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, and I was graduating from high school.

On a Zoom meeting earlier today, somebody mentioned that one of the things helping her through the pandemic was thinking about her parents who lived through both the Depression and World War II.  I have sure thought about my parents as well. They both lived through it, but Daddy kept living it the rest of his life

One of my many jobs, back before my way of earning a living was known as the “gig economy,” was as a kind of a junior, okay, very junior, honestly just-barely-adequate assistant carpenter. I do know the right way to swing a hammer, and people notice that. 

In 1979, I lived with two other friends in a very funky three-bedroom apartment in Atlanta on Vedado Way, which we called VaDildo Way because, well, we were young and thought that was funny.   Our landlady June lived in the apartment above us and dated a guy in the band Atlanta’s Finest, a very cool dude who often made his entrance to June’s via the fire escape, and we heard a lot of activity up there.  Not sure if any of it involved a dildo.

Thankfully my birthday is April 19 and not the 20th so I don’t have to share my birthday with Adolf Hitler.  Some years I have to share it with the resurrection of Jesus, but rarely, since it’s not often that April 19 falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon following the spring equinox. 

Tonight, sadly, we watched the last episode of Schitt’s Creek, a real tale for our times.  A moral fable, but a high camp, screamingly funny one.

Seven years ago today, on May 5, 2013, I had my last conversation with my brother Walker.  He had called me in April to tell me that he had been invited to a birthday party for this online conspiracy theorist, Wayne Madsen, and it sounded like he was asking me, his little sister, if he should go. 

Today was truly glorious. Also, terrible. Tense. Relaxing.  Our darling daughters ordered tacos for our Mother’s Day breakfast, I upset Julia Kate with my tone of voice and the two of us had a cry, Emi made a gorgeous fruit plate, Gretchen read a very long piece from the Times aloud to us about how Denmark had handled the coronavirus, something that did not stimulate the exact discussion hoped for, and off we went on a walk to clear our heads.

When Barack Obama was running for President in 2008, I always thought the Hope and Change thing was pretty weak. To me, hope is what you have when you don’t have a plan.

An image from long ago came to me recently.  One of my many jobs in Atlanta back in the 80s was working the front desk at a production company that claimed to be the largest in the Southeast.  I’d never heard of them, but I was just back in town from an unsuccessful out-of-state venture, and needed a job.