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’Tis that time again, wherein we look at what we’ve to be grateful for (see 2013 and 2014 for more gratitude prompters).

This time I’m going to look a little closer to home.

1.

Thanksgiving
by Bob Gill

My Thanksgiving
Turkey is on San Pablo Avenue
Alive and well on this sparkily
Fall day
Her gobble well compared
To her fatter farm bred relatives
She causes consternation
In passing cars
Uncertain of the possible brevity
Of her trafficked life
Compared to her wild sisters
In the hills
So far, she’s more lively than
A butterball
And for once, I’m not hungry.

Bob Gill is a member of my ward who shares his poetry with me. I asked his permission to share this cheering vignette with you.

Thank you, Bob!

2.

What It’s Like.
(excerpt)
by Laura Marostica

We have a cycle, here at the cancer house. It lasts two months, or the time between MRIs that check for growth in my mother’s brain tumor, which the doctors found just over a year ago. Day one goes like this: my mom goes in for her MRI, to that big loud plastic cave, comes home with my dad fuzzy and exhausted. We do our best to go about our business. Late afternoon or early evening the phone rings, and from there, for me, it is all and only terror until I hear the lift in my dad’s voice that means, once again, the tumor is stable, and we still have time. The relief leaves me weak and shivering but so light. Everything is better for a while.

Laura Marostica is a lifetime member of my ward, returned from sojourns in New York publishing and Salt Lake journalism. Her family’s tragedy had a heavy impact on our ward this year and, I think, left us better people, having mourned with those who mourn. This essay about what it’s like to love and care for someone with a terminal illess is moving and I recommend it to you in its entirely. I lifted this opening paragraph from Laura’s new blog, of which this was the initiating post.

Thank you, Laura.

3.

Mothers and Daughters
(excerpt)
by Karen Rosenbaum

Dinah was grateful that no one had chosen to slide in next to her on the Greyhound bus. She had put her big bag with the bottled apricots and wax-paper-wrapped cookies—oatmeal, her mother’s favorites—on the other seat. Her magazines were in there too, but she didn’t pull them out to read. Instead she stared out the window, sometimes leaning her forehead against the glass, sometimes wiping her eyes and cheeks with Kleenexes from her jacket pockets.

I hope, this Thanksgiving, you don’t require the kind of loneliness Karen Rosenbaum captures so well here, but if you do, I hope you find it. In the meantime, I hope that you will share in my gratitude that Karen’s first collection is coming out next month from Zarahemla. Karen was my first real editor and I’ve since moved into her ward and read many of her stories and essays and it kills me that her work isn’t more broadly known and beloved. Plan on a copy for all your friends. Christmas is taken care of.

Thank you, Karen.

4.

FF Milo Serif sets series of
Schulyer bibles
(excerpt)
by David Sudweeks

. . . with long texts you quickly begin to see how the choice of typeface is not only aesthetic or stylistic in nature, but also one of function. A piece designed to offer a comfortable reading experience must take into account type size, overall page count (a quite large or heavy book would not be very comfortable), and clearly the proportional relationship between these two.

When David Sudweeks was in my ward, he was part of both the art group and the writing group. To the former, he would bring a font he was designing; to the latter, his writing about fonts, which is to say his professional work (such as this article on a well-thunk bible). Regardless of the group, it seemed like there was always someone new whose lack of letterly knowledge led to another crash course on typography and related fields. I trust everyone in either of those erstwhile groups learned a thing or three about, say, kerning or tittles, but in the meantime, how great is it that some people spend their lives making reading as pleasant as possible?

Thanks, David!

5.

Being Grateful for God’s Hand
in a World I Understand through Science
(excerpt)
by Sariah Anne Kell

Having also been born and raised in the Church, I never
felt that science and religion weren’t compatible. . . . I am grateful that from the time we are children in the Church we are taught to appreciate the world around us; to be grateful for our senses, specifically our eyes, ears, heart, mind, and life; to be reminded that we should think about
the world around us and remember the love of God. Even if I honestly can’t admit to doing that whenever I experience something, I can see God’s hand in the world around me if I remember to.

Contrary to what this pdf claims, this talk was originally given in my ward as part of an entire sacrament meeting on the topic, and is an example of how sacrament meeting can and should be a time for love and openness and thoughtfulness and the Spirit and sharing and artistry and community. Every week should be worship expressed through the arts of human communication. Every week is a chance for the art of speaking (and music-making, etc) to help us break back through Babel to the soul-to-soul communication of out mythic past. I’m not saying this particular talk does ALL those things, but it does show what careful craft can accomplish. I’m happy it’s online where I can share it with you.

Thanks, Sariah!

And happy Thanksgiving, everyone. Look around you: Beauty may be right at hand.