Thankfulness

Since, as many people point out, Thanksgiving is fast going the way of the dinosaur--destroyed by the massive meteorite of Christmas Marketing, I plan to spend this week blogging about things for which I'm thankful. No doubt I'll throw some of the other opinions in there along the way. But really, with all the peas I constantly blog about I figure I could spend a few days writing about the mattresses. Was that just the worst metaphor ever? Probably. But I like it, so I think I'll leave it in. And yes, I'm thankful for freedom of speech, including the freedom to write abysmally.

Yes, I'm thankful for all the typical things--husband, house, housepets and clothes. But that seems to be a cheat. It's interesting to me that we live in a country where we ALL have so much to be thankful for that any recitation of gratitude, no matter how short, seems trite. (Audience: "Yeah, we know--you're thankful for This Great Nation, yada yada") And of course being an unashamed Christian you know I'm thankful for Jesus' death and resurrection, the Anabaptist reformation and (*surprisingly*) many of the Wesleyan hymns. These are all the greatest of gifts.

The smaller gifts are the grace notes I intend to celebrate this week. Today's item of gratitude is the inkpen. Ball-point, Gel, Felt-tip. They've been around my whole life and they seem like a bit of nonsense. You can buy them for a quarter, if you can't pick one up for free at the many places where they're given away. Not so many years ago, writing something required a bit of a production. You had to have pen nibs with ink to dip them in. You had to have a blotter handy to absorb the excess ink, and you had to be a good judge of how much ink it took to write something fully. Otherwise you ended up with a scratchy mess of unevenly distributed gobs of blue-black gunk. Once they invented the fountain pen, you could discard the inkwell, but still had the problems of nibs that would split, ink that wouldn't flow evenly and blotches of blue in your shirt pocket. Writing required more consideration, and more even surfaces. Not any more. Now we have easily acquired and readily adaptable pens. You can write anything pretty much anywhere and at a moment's notice. Your mind can be free and thoughts can be freely noted. I think that's great. And I'm thankful for it. I love being able to jot. And this is a lot of words to write about jotting. So I'm done.