The Plight of a Fallen Cranberry
Nov, 25
(a true story about thankfulness)
It wasn’t as if I was looking for insight, or had a problem understanding thankfulness. I was, in all actuality, just satisfying a random twinge of hunger by eating an ample helping of dried cranberries. But then, the outcast of fate, an unlucky cranberry, soon found itself partially imbedded in the carpet halfway between the table leg and my big toe. For the moment, I left it lay there. Instead, my thoughts recalled leaving my studio apartment just a few days ago. I was disgruntled in part by the smallness of my abode, but as my eyes glanced through a neighbor’s window I understood in an instant—the entirety of their furniture consisted of an air mattress. And why is it that I often catch myself bemoaning the fact that some joint of my body does not let me run as often or as far as I wish? Usually, just then, I catch sight of someone walking with a limp strong enough to remind me that they never had the opportunity to run—once.
These things do, of course, remind me to be thankful, but there was something more to the fallen cranberry. I am thankful for my family, my childhood home, and my country. Yet it was by no act of my will that they appear as they do. I didn’t ask for them, arrange them, or earn them. I am reminded also that I didn’t choose to be loved, appreciated, or forgiven… and yet I am… and for that I am extremely grateful. Others, I know, live in much different worlds, different lives, and in different times… As I reached down to pick up the fallen cranberry it occurred to me that sometimes I am the mouth enjoying the sweetness, other times I am the one fallen, and still other times I am the unnoticed hand reaching out, but in all ways I ought to be thankful. In that moment I was surprised, first by how quickly thankfulness replicates itself, and secondly by how easy it is to set into motion one of the most profound mysteries of this world—how the simplest act of touch transforms what was moments before the waste of this world into something of value and an instigator of thankfulness. For instead of tossing the cranberry into the trash I took it outside and put it under the bird feeder. I didn’t stay to watch, but I am confident that it was quickly consumed by something with fur or feathers. And in that moment, he too was thankful.
Happy Thanksgiving!
