Thanks, World

Dear George,

We’ve been through a nervous three weeks following Katja’s complications from shoulder replacement surgery.  There’s nothing like losing the ability to breathe to make one appreciative of being alive.  While Katja still has an oxygen tank at home, she uses it a bit less each day, and we’re looking ahead to a full recovery.  Thanksgiving this year is an especially good time to reflect on all the good things in our lives, past and present. 

Thanks to Katja, first of all, whose has supplied most of the things that have made our lives enjoyable for the past 59 years. 

Thanks to our NOLA family, J, K, L, and V, who have helped make our senior years much more rewarding than we ever expected.  

Thanks to my parents for our extraordinary upbringing as kids and to my siblings with whom I’ve enjoyed my happiest times at our many family reunions at Farm.  

Thanks to a bevy of friends over the years who have generated much of our fun and frivolity.

Thanks to my Menominee High School teachers who gave me a solid grounding for moving on in the world and to Antioch College, a remarkable institution where I might have been the only Upper Peninsula graduate in history. 

Thanks to my graduate school mentors in social psychology, my university colleagues and grad students, and the university’s retirement plan which keeps us afloat.  

Thanks to my zumba and line dancing instructors who assist me each week in the battle against old age.  

Thanks to the OLLI program at the university where the poetry classes have given me a new avocation.  

Thanks to our Clifton neighborhood which makes us feel at home and keeps us well supplied with Skyline Chili and Graeters ice cream.    

In many ways we’re enjoying the most enjoyable time of our lives.  Relatively free of stress, entirely free of work pressures, no bosses or worries about “getting ahead”, and plenty of time to devote to enjoyable leisure pursuits.  That makes for a happy Thanksgiving.

Love,

Dave