The Debts We Cannot Repay

Thanksgiving Reflection

As a high school junior,

I was required to meet with

my guidance counselor,

Richard Thompson.

My middling grades, and

an offer from my father

to take over the family business

right after high school,

assumed my trajectory.

My plans were set.

Mr. Thompson challenged me

to look further into my future.

He told me I had a high IQ,

that I would do well in college,

that other options would open up

for me if I continued my studies.

College degrees were not part of

my family history.

I gave Mr. Thompson’s advice

considerable thought.

My direction changed.

His encouragement reversed the

course of my young life,

with huge impacts down the road.

I think about Mr. Thompson,

no longer alive,

but alive in me,

in the spirit of Thanksgiving.

No matter how frugally

we’ve spent and saved,

or how much owed we’ve paid,

we swim in an unending sea of debt.

Thanksgiving is that time of year

when I acknowledge

my own indebtedness.

I’m speaking not about financial tallies

or the return of favors

or material obligations

whose kind we too easily square up.

No, some debits we can never repay –

those we owe to our forebearers,

up-bringers, and the multitude

of human scaffolds on whose timbers

we solidly stand, and learn and stretch.

Those who believed in us

when we didn’t believe in ourselves,

and trusted what we could become

more than we ourselves could imagine.

Those who crossed our path

at just the right time

to influence a directional shift,

when ignorance and miscalculation

could easily have taken us downhill.

We owe our family members,

ancestral and current,

the flawed and gifted,

the saints and sinners,

the scoundrels and achievers.

Let them all into the circle,

who showed us,

by aspiration,

what to embody and repeat,

or by accident,

what not to put up with.

Remember the role models

who kept our compass points sharp

in times of transition and confusion. 

Memory will whisper who they are.

Every Thanksgiving, we encounter

the stout ripples of significant others,

the living and the dead,

the admired and despised,

inviting them to sit

at the table of our awareness,

to bestow their annual blessings

or tardy apologies,

as the case may be.

This Thanksgiving Feast,

let gastronomic abundance

offer but a humble backdrop

for true appreciation,

an excuse to gather and remember

that each of us is an alive somebody,

a receiver of unearned

relationship fortunes that

have made all the difference.

Who is it that anchors

your life and your past? 

What are their names and faces? 

Remember them now, on this day.

And the gifts you have received

by their sacrifices,

and their delinquencies.

At the meal,

stop and remember

what cannot be repaid,

and resolve to be for others what

others have been for you.

This is the higher purpose

and invitation of Thanksgiving.