Today is Thanksgiving and among older celebrants, it is as much a time for reflection on Thanksgivings past as it is for the holiday we observe today.
All of us have a special memory of the holiday, perhaps many years in the past, of people and places and moments that remain fixed in our minds.
Thanksgiving is no one thing, of course. Each of us have our own ideas of what the holiday should be.
But if the spirit of Thanksgiving is, indeed, gratitude, the best Thanksgiving I can recall happened on a warm May day in Arizona about 10 years ago as I watched an 8-year-old boy redefine the meaning of what it means to be thankful.
The occasion was a celebration of a fitness program in Mesa, Arizona, for the city’s special-needs students.
Each year, special education teachers and administrators from the state’s largest school district planned a fitness walk for the children in their programs. The students picked a destination — San Francisco, Chicago, even New York — calculated the miles the walk would cover and then logged their progress from their regular walks during physical education periods throughout the school year.
Near the end of the school year, the students gathered at big park in east Mesa to walk the final mile, followed by a party with a theme celebrating the food of their destination city.
This particular year, the students were walking to Philadelphia. Cheese-steak sandwiches awaited them at the finish line.
Hundreds of kids, parents, teachers and volunteers gathered at the park, which featured a broad, paved half-mile walking path that wrapped around a lake. Two trips around would mean the end of a 2,329 mile journey to Philly.
Of course, many of the students weren’t walking: They rolled along the path in motorized wheelchairs. Some used walkers.
The students were supposed to stay in their school groups and volunteers were assigned to make sure the kids stayed together.
That is how I met Matthew, an 8-year-old boy with a cognitive disability that, his teacher told me later, left him with the mental state of a 3-year-old. He was a tall, handsome green-eyed boy with an Arizona Diamondbacks baseball cap pulled low over his curly blonde hair, a happy child, eager to get started on the walk.
My job was to be his “walking buddy” and make sure he stayed with the other students from his school, Las Sendas Elementary.
“This will be easy,” I thought, noting that he had no physical disability that would likely make it difficult for him to keep pace.
And then we started walking. A few feet down the path, his bright eyes fixed on a rock along the pathway.
“Look!” he shouted, darting off the path to pick up the rock. He held it up to the sun, examining it closely. “Cool!” he said.
I gently guided him back to the path, and we resumed the walk, although we were now a few feet behind his classmates.
We walked another 10 yards or so before Matthew again bolted off the trail, having discovered yet another interesting rock. The pattern repeated itself along the path. Halfway through the first lap, we were lagging hopelessly behind, mingling with students from other schools, who passed us as Matthew stopped to examine rock after rock.
Finally, a shout from his teacher far long the path, drifted back to us.
“Matthew?”
“We’re back here,” I shouted back. “Every thing’s OK!”
“He needs to catch up with us!” the teacher shouted.
“We’re trying!” I shouted back.
But it was, of course, no use. My gentle encouragements to keep moving were met with a sincere nod, but then a few steps later there was another rock which simply could not be ignored.
Soon, the kids from Las Sendas had lapped us and were heading to the finish line.
Matthew never seemed to notice.
A hundred yards from the finish line, Matthew’s eyes fixed on a shiny object just off the path – a shiny black stone.
By now, I was a little frustrated. We were the last people on the path, and I could see the party had already started at the pavilion.
When I looked again in Matthew’s direction, he was holding the little shiny black stone toward the sun and on his face I saw something that stopped me cold. The smile on his face, his expression of wonder, the light that shown from those piercing green eyes conveyed not simply appreciation for something he judged to be beautiful, but of gratitude, a deep unspoken thankfulness.
How small I judged myself to be at that moment, how selfish, how ungrateful for all the unexplainable good fortune and undeserved blessings I had always taken for granted.
But here, on this warm spring day, an 8-year-old boy found a stone and his heart seemed almost to burst with gratitude.
It was Thanksgiving Day.
Yes, today is Thanksgiving, but the mood of our nation doesn’t reflect its spirit. We are angry, fearful, troubled, suspicious.
If we pause to be grateful today, the unspoken prayer we offer is more akin to that of the Pharisee — “I am thankful that I am not like other men” — rather than the petition of the poor guilt-ridden tax collector — “Have mercy on me, a sinner.”
Today is Thanksgiving and each year I think of Matthew.
He is a young man of 18, yet still a small child, still finding a stone along the pathway, still marveling in the wonder of it, a hymn of Thanksgiving written on his shining face.
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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