Gratitudinal

We’ve all experienced those days when we’re keenly aware of the blessings bestowed upon us. The old admonition, “Count Your Blessings” is a very wise one, because when we start numbering the ways in which God had shown His favor to us, we find ourselves freefalling into example after example after example, and we realize how churlish and petulant and ungrateful we can be, and these are good days, because we are brought up short and we turn to Him and the unfeigned gratitude pours out of us like tears or belly-laughs or dream-sighs.

I sat in the backseat today at noon as is my custom, and I opened the thermos and poured out a large helping of my wife’s homemade chicken & sausage & shrimp gumbo, drowning a portion of rice waiting in the bowl. And as I dipped my spoon into the mixture, I said aloud something I’ve said so many, many times to Mrs. Orr.

I live like a king.

I mean, there I was, sitting in an old-but-paid-for-Ford, eating gumbo kept hot by the minor miracle of a Thermos, gumbo prepared especially for me by a woman who not only loves me but proves that she loves me with her every word and action, sitting there and eating beneath a tree whose leaves I know like I know my own knuckles, a tree I talk to and think about during my hours away from her, a well-fed man in good spirits and in good health, eating and reading a sweet and generous email from one of my readers. My readers! I still can’t fully grasp that there are a handful of people in this world who actually read and enjoy the things that come tumbling out of my mind and down my wrists and out of my fingertips onto this electronic page. And I finished my lunch and dabbed my lips with a napkin and went back inside to do my wage-slavery, smiling because I knew that I would, in a few hours, be walking into my little farmhouse and kissing my beautiful little wife and being attacked by my rambunctious spotted dog.

I live like a king.

I am guilty of many things, but ingratitude is not one of them.

~ S.K. Orr