in Giving Thanks, a column for Thursday's New York Times that is available online now.
Sometimes I encounter a column of which all I can say is that you should read it. It is impossible to properly summarize it, and unfair to selectively quote from it.
This is such a column.
Despite that, allow me to offer a bit from the middle, not even the best part. It comes after he begins the column with news about a friend who died recently, young, and how it brought him up short. Then come these three paragraphs:
And I forget how truly blessed I have been by whatever gods there may be. It doesn’t mean that there haven’t been troubles and trials. There have. But I have had it in me to overcome. And for the mere fact of having enough and to all the people in my life who have informed my character and given me courage, I need to give a measure of thanks. So, here goes:
I’m thankful for the basic things, like food and shelter and warmth when it is cold and medicine when I am sick. I grew up staring poverty squarely in the face, but I fear that far too many have no familiarity — or even empathy — with what it means to be poor in this country, or in any country.
Poverty is a diabolical predicament that not only makes scarce one’s physical comforts, but drains away one’s spiritual strength. It damages hopes and dreams, and having deficits among those things is when the soul begins to die.
There is so much more in this column, in which among others Blow thanks his regular readers.
I am one of them.
To him I offer back my thanks, for the many wonderful columns he has given us, especially this one.
Peace.