I’m thankful for …

I’m thankful for …

Having Furman Bisher as a decades-long guest for Thanksgiving dinner, a morning visitor delivered to our doorstep to remind us that, as William Faulkner wrote, “You always wear out life long before you wear out the possibilities of living.”

Bisher’s Thanksgiving Day column is a yearly reminder of life’s daily pleasures and endless possibilities.

I intrude on the master’s turf respectfully acknowledging a need to pay franchise royalties.

Freedom and independence, that earned and that given.

The acquisition of material goods, beyond those vital to my family’s well-being, have never been a reason to get up in the morning.

Newspapers were. They are instruments capable of informing, and thereby empowering, a free people to make choices — choices that make the lives of individuals, and therefore their families and communities, better and stronger.

A free press matters. It’s worth waking up for. My gift from the Cox family was the freedom to argue my passions without interference on their pages.

Having been given the opportunity to serve our country and thereby to express my gratitude to those whose service gave — and gives — me freedom.

I am thankful for Cousin Woodrow Eugene Wooten, who on the day I was born in Telfair County, Ga., was among a group of prisoners of war in the 61st day of an 86-day death march across almost 600 miles of Germany.

I am thankful to have known former Georgia state Sen. Joe Burton of DeKalb County, another World War II veteran, whose true devotion to public service personified everything good about his generation. Both Joe and my cousin are now gone.

I am thankful, though, that state Rep. John Yates of Griffin lives and serves, the sole survivor of WW II military service remaining in the Georgia General Assembly.

I am thankful that I have earned the right to look John Yates and other WW II veterans in the eye and say with pride and love of country: I have done my duty, sir.

Living in a state that gives us camellias to carry us through the winter and azaleas and dogwoods and jonquils to greet us in the spring, and those deep purple crepe myrtles that stand among the more common reds and whites and pinks that bloom in profusion through the Georgia summers.

And fall, yes, when the maple tree decorates the ground in a mosaic of reds and yellows and oranges and browns. And I am thankful that I can see it all on the land cultivated by my father, and his father and his, and hold the soil that contains the sweat and salt of their bodies and see it seep through my fingers back into the good earth.

Meeting Ann Jarrett, the brown-eyed girl in a journalism lab at the University of Georgia who has now consented to share 42 years of my life.

And I am thankful for the spot of gray in her hair, my contribution to her beauty and a medallion of long married love.

Images from the womb of Stella Ann Faur, our first grandchild, due before Christmas.

I’m thankful, too, for her parents, Derrick and Jennifer, the little red-haired girl now about to become a mother. Both are solid and good of heart, the parents I would have chosen for Stella Ann.

And finally, I am thankful for the resilience of the American people. We can survive wars, depressions and presidents.