Thanks…Again: Gratitude Revisited

If you follow me on Facebook, you know that each day I offer up five things I’m grateful for, and end with the question “what are you grateful for today?”. It’s both a random and thoughtfully-prepared list, fed by a life and an outlook that friendly strangers and acquaintances might call Pollyanna-ish.

I’m ok with that.

I know from the inside out that my life has been, and continues to be, a rich and diverse collection of experiences and lessons, inclusive of peace and heartbreak in equal measure. What got me here and keeps me here is gratitude.

I have no trouble identifying those five things that make the list. I often have trouble stopping at just five, but understand that we all have lives to live and bills to pay. So I post those five and then step into a day that will give me another five hundred.

For months now, I’ve felt a strong pull to reach back and review those lists, to sit and visit with them like old friends, and then, randomly, grab one item from the stack and fill in the back story. Why was I grateful for dental floss that chilly day in October? I could meander in a thousand directions, all from a simple incomplete sentence, a bullet point of thanks that simply couldn’t stay put or unmentioned, but begged for the light of day.

So here’s a risk, an attempt at plunging a bit deeper into the pool of gratefulness and seeing what’s there.

(And for a more in-depth look at where this daily list making ritual originated, check out the post “Today, Dear Friends, I’m Grateful For…” It explains everything).

Here we go:

Wednesday, August 31, 2016, 5:39a.m.

Today, dear friends, I am grateful for…

Starting the day with massage and acupuncture

People who understand the risk of telling their stories, and tell them anyway

How pizza makes a tough day a little better

The aroma of the local health food store—all herby-y, coconut oil and weathered wood

Being in love like we just met last week, after twenty years

What are you grateful for today?

I met my first hippie when I was a freshman in college. He was sitting at a round table in the dining hall, eating a bowl of something heaped over with sprouts. Wearing a plaid cotton shirt, denim overalls with scuffed brass buckles and a broad smile, he stood and reached out to shake my hand, “Hi! I’m Steve. I’ll be coordinating your volunteer project at the migrant center in Hartville this Saturday.” All freshmen needed to complete community service hours our first weekend on campus, before the big kids showed up, and I signed on to paint the buildings where transient workers from Mexico and Central America checked in, got their tools, and ate their lunches. Steve would drive a handful of us over in one of the college vans.

I sat down with my tray of grilled cheese and salad (no sprouts—his overflowing bowl of them was my first introduction. I also didn’t know what migrants were. Looks like my post-high school education began outside the classroom), and I proudly told him I was majoring in Accounting/Finance so I could make a lot of money and buy my dad a boat. At eighteen, you keep it simple and quotable. He smiled and nodded, and the conversation drifted easily past family, hometown, and hobbies. I don’t recall why or how, but I remember telling him at some point that “abortion is my pet peeve” (I’m miles from that position now; another story for another time), and he listened patiently before offering “instead of ‘pet peeve’, how about ‘social concern’?”, and I tucked that phrase away into my fast-growing grown-up vocabulary, where it lives still, worn at the edges for all its use over the decades. We ended on a lighter note, and I wandered back to the dorm, unaware that my feet were now on a new Path I’d be traveling for the next 30+ years.

Steve lived in a large house off-campus with four other recent graduates (don’t all hippies live in communes??), and that Saturday my fellow first-years and I ended up there after the migrant center painting plans were rained out. We had lunch (more sprouts, more ‘social concern’ talk, more education about migrant workers) and I think Steve turned in our service hours for credit, though none of us held a paint brush that day (shhh…don’t tell the Student Life office). After lunch we wandered around the house—an old two-story duplex with wooden floors, a working fireplace, a once-employed kitchen upstairs and a modest backyard where Tom, one of the five roommates, practiced his cello when the skies were clear. There were also two Mikes—one became a teacher, the other was a triathlete—and Rob, psychology major and Dan Fogelberg doppelganger with guitar talent to match. I didn’t know it then, but the following summer, I’d become part of that household and for the first time in my life, I’d have my own room.

Steve worked at the local health food store a couple miles up the street, where he packed and shipped herbs and other supplements in the warehouse next to the retail operation. He mentioned over dinner one night that they were looking for another cashier, and thought I might apply. This would be a big move for me, since my only other form of employment up until then was babysitting. A worthy job, to be sure, but it didn’t require a dress code or timeclock. I got an interview, and was just about to leave the house wearing a nice-fitting but totally inappropriate terrycloth short set (really short shorts; oh dear), and once again, Steve came to the rescue, recalibrating my presentation by diplomatically suggesting slacks and a blouse. I didn’t even know I was being schooled on proper job interview attire, he was that kind.

I met with Don, the owner, in an upstairs office (the store itself was yet another old house with wooden floors, renovated and rearranged for retail but retaining all the charm of its original purpose, a family’s home where the previous residents used to live and kick back after work and maybe raise a kid or two). After a review of my qualifications (basically, I was cheerful and teachable), we closed the deal. As I made my way downstairs to explore the layout and inventory, I inhaled an aroma that would stay with me, imprinted and forever associated with all health food stores thereafter: an earthy mingling of garlic, valerian root, lavender, coconut, carob, trail mix and patchouli oil. This is what the world should smell like all the time, I thought as I walked out into the late May sun and unlocked my bicycle from the metal rack in the parking lot. I would be happy here.

And I was, after that awkward first-day moment where Don ceremoniously presented me with a green t-shirt emblazoned with the company logo (to replace the red “Coke Adds Life” t-shirt I was wearing. I’ll wait, while you snicker and roll your eyes. Ahhh..young folk). This first real job anchors all of my college memories, a mental gathering place where some of the most significant relationships in my life were created and nurtured. My first week there, I was stocking the Celestial Seasonings tea section when my philosophy professor jumped out from behind a cardboard end cap chocolate display, singing “I Can’t Stop Loving You”. You just can’t get that at Walmart.

The connection between smell and memory is well-known and researched (I highly recommend the article from The Harvard Gazette, “What the Nose Knows”, by Colleen Walsh, February 27, 2020), and I suspect on August 31, 2016, my morning cup of green tea triggered the memory of the aromas for which I was grateful that day. Like a spiderweb’s silken spokes, recalling that simple slice of my formative adult years sprouted all manner of wonderful tangents, each a small book of its own with meanderings and writing prompts to delight me for years to come.

A health food store by any other name would smell as sweet (hat tip to the Bard).

Until next time, thanks…again.