My Thanksgiving gratitude starts with small things.  The narrow space between the shoulders of a cat, nudging me from sleep.  The gentle furrows at the small of my wife’s back.  The percussive boil of bacon fat hitting the residue of cranberry left in a recycled grease can.  The New York Times.  The dimples of snark in Marcus’s cheeks as he asks, “What EXACTLY do they mean about Jesus dying for our sins, anyway?” The fact that the dimples remain as I attempt to answer.

The fact that we had autumn this year, even if it lasted only three weeks before it fell smack on the face of winter.  On its final day, a November morning in the mid-sixties, I descended from the backside of campus and crossed a bridge over the creek and adjacent bike path.  A saxophone melody rose from below.  As I rounded the sidewalk onto the path, I caught the silhouette of a portly, bearded man blowing jazz, his sax tipped upward, improvising in the shadows, his backpack a few steps away.  At first his notes echoed in a discordant jumble off the planes of concrete in his dark sheltered place.  But as I walked on, the music came into startling focus.  The curve of earthen embankment, the dying leaves, the flow of water, and the warmth of day all combined to make a perfect sounding board, and suddenly a tender melody emerged.

What struck me most — and what has remained with me since — is that this perfection was for me alone.  The player couldn’t hear what I heard, and couldn’t know I’d heard it.   And just as I realized how lovely it was, it vanished.  I’d walked a few steps farther on, and a breeze of incoming weather had begun to rattle the leaves.  The acoustics resumed their misalignment, and the player became again just a homeless man blowing aimless jazz.

The next day it dropped to five below zero.  I shivered through the first block of my commute, and as if on cue, a flight of Canada geese honked overhead.  I stopped to hear their call, hoping they too would be somehow perfect.  Their notes were lovely – sharp and echoless into an opaque sky, all the moisture frozen out of them — but in the end they sounded just like geese on a peppery day.   I reminded myself that perfection cannot be conjured, but only received, and only then if we are lucky and pay attention.

This year I’ve received a fortune of love, and a great excuse to pay attention.  What more could I ask?