Finding Gratitude … And Letting It Find Me

I didn’t realize my 50s would be filled with epiphanies

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

The day after Thanksgiving, I rose early to prepare breakfast for my daughter who was visiting from Los Angeles. She’s a first-year medical student at the David Geffen

School of Medicine at UCLA.

I made things she likes: scrambled eggs cooked low and slow so they retain their brilliant yellow color and fold like a wet napkin when I push them in the pan; hash browns made the way my mother taught me, tossed in flour and cooked with sweet onions and peppers; a bowl of watermelon, honeydew and cantaloupe.

As I prepared the food under her cheerful gaze, a familiar feeling enveloped me, recalling a younger, simpler version of myself when I was a single dad raising three children and my primary concern was making sure they were safe, happy and well-fed.

My daughter recalled many of the foods I made for them — dishes she loved — that I always cooked even when her friends had to eat out or eat leftovers. She remembered how she always promised her elementary school class that I would make my “famous fried chicken strips” for their potlucks, and how I always did.

It was a stressful period of my life, but it was also one of the most beautiful. I was proud of what I was doing for my family, my soul nourished by fulfilling a primal responsibility. I was freely giving all of myself to them, and I was at peace with the surrender and sacrifice. It felt like I was doing what God had made me to do.

And in this moment, hovering over my stove with the comforting sizzle of frying things in the air, this tremendous spirit of gratitude envelops me. It didn’t feel fleeting but instead like a life-altering clarification: that we are all in constant motion, jockeying and measuring our coats by other people’s dimensions, losing sight of all that is great in our own lives — all the things, great and small, for which we should be appreciative.