A THANKFUL OLD MAN

This is a short version of a story I read and can relate to.  It happened during the Great Depression when money and food were scarce.   I don't know who the author is.

The old man and his dog sat by the fire in his cabin on a cold Thanksgiving night.   His wife had passed away recently and loneliness now filled most of his life.    He had lost his faith and did not give much thought to a Thanksgiving dinner.   He thought about baking some sweet potatoes with biscuits for dinner as he had some stored in his root cellar along with some onions and carrots.    There was a knock on his door.  It was the two neighbor boys asking to come in and get warm by the fire.   They told the old man he was invited over to their house for dinner if he could bring some of his sweet potatoes as they had very little food, except some chickens and greens.   He had the boys fill a bucket with the potatoes and they took off for home telling the old man he did not need to dress up as none of them would be.    The old man did put on a clean shirt on with his overalls, put a jacket and hat on before walking through the woods for about a mile to the neighbor's cabin.   When he entered the cabin there was the pleasant smell of food cooking.  During the dinner there was pleasant conversation and the boy's father reminded the old man they had not forgot how he helped them move some firewood a few months earlier.   The father also told the old man he was welcome to have some of their hen chickens as they could not afford to feed all of them.   The old man started home with a large gunny sack containing the hens as he made his way through the woods.   He got to thinking how he could sell some of the eggs in town for cash.   While walking on this clear cold night he looked up to see a full moon and became thankful for what he had as he started regaining some of his faith.  

BEING THANKFUL AT COSTCO

It was the day before Thanksgiving as I made my way through Costco in hopes of purchasing a pumpkin pie.  As I made my way through the crowd I could feel the holiday cheer with all the people trying to get through the aisles in hopes of filling their carts.   As I approached the pie coolers it was standing room only as a baker had a cart with trays of pies as he was trying to unload them into the cooler.  We all grabbed one making a dash for the checkout counters where the lines went back through the store aisles.  The person ahead of me must have had 500 items in his cart as I waited to pay for the pie.   Once outside I was thankful for surviving the ordeal and having the pie at a cost of $5.99, probably should have got two of them, but did not want to be greedy.  

Happy Thanksgiving! 

GRANDSON SAM AND HIS HALLOWEEN CANDY

 After collecting his Halloween candy from hitting the streets of his neighborhood, Sam became sick for a few days and did not have a desire to eat any of it, so his parents set it aside.    While Sam was recovering his parent sampled a few pieces of his candy thinking he would not notice what was missing when he felt better.   When Sam did feel better he asked for his candy and sure enough he noticed there was some missing pieces and asked where they were.  His mother had to confess.   Sam became a little upset and with a parental tone told his mother they should have asked him first before doing what they did.  Not bad for a four and a half year old-right?  

MY DOG JACK

It was a late November afternoon in 1989 when I was about ready to leave work at the Cottage Grove Ranger District office and go home to a little house I rented on Lynx Hollow Road north of Cottage Grove.   No sooner than I started packing up my things to head out the door when a woman that worked on the road maintenance crew came up to me asking if I would take a puppy they picked up walking along a forest road where it was beginning to snow.   She knew I had just put my old family dog Corky to sleep because of health issues.   She said she could not take the dog because they already had some dogs.    So I went home with the little black puppy that looked more like a cub bear that I named Jack.

There was a storage room in the back of the house where I left Jack during the day with food, water and a partially opened window as I went off to work.   When I came home at night I let Jack out in the back yard and he had free range in the house at night.   One wall of the storage room had unpacked boxes of items from the house I sold in Gold Beach in 1988.   After a few weeks I noticed Jack was in a corner of the storage room as if something had been bothering him during the day.  One day I saw a wild cat jump in through the opened window and discovered she had a litter of kittens in one of the boxes.   Jack had become accustomed to this wild cat coming and going as she raised her kittens.   Later I discovered the after birth in the box where she had the litter.   The wild cat and her kittens left the house to live in the barn behind the house and roam the nearby fields for rats or other small varmints.   In 1991 I bought a house in south Eugene in order to allow my two children to live with me on a part-time basis while they were in high school and their mother was considering moving out of the area.   Jack was two years old and I constructed a fenced yard with a dog house where he stayed when I was working in Cottage Grove.  Over the next few years Jack went on many hikes, backpacking trips and in the Fall of 1997 went on a  cross country car trip with me to visit a sister living in Indiana.    When Celia and I bought a house in Cottage Grove and got married in 2000 Jack became part of the family.   Jack was susceptible to seizures and in 2005 we had to send him over the Rainbow Bridge due to failing health.