Gratitude

It’s hard to feel grateful when you have everything you want. Gratitude is easier to come by when you realize you have the things you really need. But the essence of gratitude is when you are grateful even for that of which you are deprived.

Deprivation can be a source of humility, determination, patience, and even inner peace.

My grandfather was missing an eye, but he never lacked for it. He wore big clunky hearing aids but he never had to say “what?” because he wasn’t paying attention to you. He did far more than most people in their 20s or 30s to his last day in his early 70s.

He had a small home, a small farm, and he drove a modest car. His idea of vacation was spending the cold months in a trailer park in Florida with his wife and other snowbirds. His idea of entertainment was watching the Cubs on WGN every afternoon of the season. His idea of excitement was his riding lawnmower, filleting blue gill over newspaper on a picnic table in his back yard, taking a nap in his hammock, or his playing host to his neighbors for a game of cards. His idea of summer was spending a month fishing with his grandson(s), and receiving a two-week visit from his oldest child while she ran around seeing her friends and ofher family. The only thing I ever heard him complain about was nuisance birds. I’ve never known anybody else so seemingly content, but then I guess when you live through the Great Depression and you’re told you can’t go to war in a time when it was the very definition of masculine identity, you become acclimated to being grateful for what you have. His children moved on. He lost his soulmate. He welcomed the children of his second wife into his life with equal affection.

He was laid to rest without acclaim but with the esteem of his community and congregation. He never wanted much, he didn’t strive to accumulate, when he hugged you you knew you’d been hugged, he was a kidder, and he smiled a lot. He called his grandson who spent a month in the summer with him “Timmer.”

Leigh Edward Raven - my grandfather, a grateful and great man, and a birthday present every year of my life, even after so many years moved on.