I remember waay back in school, which was waay back since my mom pulled my out of school at age 8 saying that Satan controlled the government, the government controlled the schools, and it was the schools job to brain way children into serving Satan. But the 4 years I did attend school from age 5 to 8 I remember that each Thanksgiving we had to write a list of things we were thankful for, so I figured why not make one to post here?
Things I am Thankful For:
Life:
On thanksgiving I think about life and death a lot. I’ll explain why at the end of this list…death and Thanksgiving go hand in hand in my family, this is a hard day to find a reason to be thankful.
If you observe everything around you the way I do, you’ll realize how close we are to death each and every day…. at every intersection there is always a car that jumps the light and goes before it’s green or runs the light and goes after it’s turned red… in the past 30 years I’ve been in 12 car accidents that were caused by red light runners and jumpers… each time we missed the car that caused the accident, thanks to my dad’s quick set the car into a spin and halt action (he should be a stunt driver, he is good), we end up rear ended by the car behind us, that didn’t see the light jumper in time to stop.
And I don’t know how many times we are in a traffic jam on Rt One, waiting for a multi car pile up to be towed away… speeders, drunk drivers, over medicated drivers, tired truckers, and light jumpers are always the cause of those accidents, people often die on Rt One… there are a 4 or 5 white crosses every few miles… it is both he longest and deadlist road in the State. and a road we travel on almost every day as our street is off it. So the first thing on my list is always Life…. My life, my families life, all life. Taken in the odds of death by car on that road, we are very lucky to say we drive that road every day and lived to tell the tale.
My Family:
My three brothers are the greatest thing to ever happen, they are more than just my three brothers, they are also my three best friends. We do everything together. I am ever thankful for them.
My Dad, crazy, animal loving, mountain man, hermit that he is, my thrill driving stunt man want-a-be Dad, is the greatest Dad this world ever saw. I am a ever thankful for him.
My Mom, totally wacko, usually to lost in the world of prescription drugs and singing in bars to remember to spend time with her children even today on Thanksgiving, I still am thankful to have her, in her own strange way she has taught me to see life through the eyes of patience.
My animals:
In my lifetime more than 5,000 pets have called this place home, some for their entire lives, others for just a few weeks of recovery, others, spent their senior years in sanctuary here have an early life of hardship, many wild babies who’s mothers have been killed by cars, have grown up here and released to the wild after reaching adulthood… and no drought thousands more will come and go over the years. Two wild babies have stayed on here, now 7 years old… a Pigeon and a Siamese Kitten, every time I am here typing these posts to you, they are here at the computer with me, my constant companions…Pidgie and Utopia.
The State of Maine:
I love Maine and all it’s wild beauty. I love the natives and their weird anti-social ways. I love the rocky coast lines and the fishing villages. I love the ancient old growth trees. I love the friendly French people who always seem to be bubbling over with joy and happiness. I love the tourists that come here every summer for our beaches, ever fall for our foliage, and every winter for our snow, and year round for antique shops and visiting historic houses.
My grandmother.:
Throughout my childhood I spent more time with Grammy than anyone. A wild schizophrenic, her mind never developed past the mentality of a 4 or 5 year old, her sense of logic and reason was beyond comprehension to most people, and she was shunned by all but 3 of her 12 children, and all but 9 of her more than 200 grandchildren. She lived in a world of butterflies, birds, animals, Halloween pumpkins, Santa Clause, Betty Boop, Miss Piggy, angels, and Jesus. She lived to celebrate every holiday. Holidays without Grammy are not the same… for every holiday we each received a card on each day of the month until the holiday arrived…not normal cards, but the biggest, gaudiest, brightest colored, often pop-up, and usual Disney cards, with their insides totally plastered with bright, glittering, sparkly, fuzzy, puffy, and/or scratch and sniff stickers.
Her house was decorated inside and out year around… 3 or 4 Christmas trees throughout the house, decorated with black cats, witches, jack-o-lanterns, Betty Boop, and lots and lots of tinsel. Tissue paper turkeys, Easter bunnies, and shamrocks in the windows, Pictures of Santa on every wall… Grammy’s house was a magical holiday play land 365 days a year. Every day was a holiday there. It was Grammy who taught me that Thanksgiving was the day to hug turkeys not eat them.
Grammy travels to 6 continents, and over 200 countries in her life time… it was her goal to visit each and every country in the world. She was a very vocal animal rights activist, a vegan to the utmost extreme, and she did more to help the homeless of Biddeford than anyone else ever has. As a child she was an orphan sent from one foster home to the next in a time when foster home children were nothing more than free farm hands and abused like slaves, the result was her activism for children’s rights, which lasted until the day she died. A Kickapoo Indian, she embraced her culture by living at one with nature and become a very spiritual person, taking up the arts of a “weather witch” shaman, though not a Wiccan, her lifestyle would today be considered as such. Grammy was an active promoter of Jesus as well, preaching his words to anyone who would listen; her religion of choice was the Seventh Day Adventist, because of their stand on animal rights, children’s rights, veganism, and Saturday worship… the rest of their teachings she often debated with her pastor.
She never drove a car and walked every where. She walked from Biddeford to Old Orchard Beach almost every week, and for those who don’t know how far that is…it’s one hell of a walk. Before she broken her hip in the early 1990’s, she roller skated every where she needed to go.
This was her favorite time of year… fall foliage season, when we, she and my family, drove across Maine, it was a vacation tradition with us, to stop everything we were doing, pack the car with food, and visit a different town in Maine, each and every day, from September through November… at one time or another we have visited every town in Maine south of the Hanesville Woods, and nearly every town in New Hampshire.
The last six years of her life she became less active and became to try repeatedly to reopen communications with her stuck-up holier than thou Mormon children… but try as she might, they continued to snub her, accusing her of being a child of Satan, saying she was possessed with an evil spirit, and telling her that the sooner she died and burned in Hell the happier they would be. They said that if she was dead they could force her to join the Mormon church by “baptism for the dead”. They told her that dead, she wouldn’t embarrass them with her child like ways, her outlandish cloths, her animals, her sinful lack of eating meat (the only gifts she ever received from them were each year they’ sarcastically send her gift baskets of ham, sausages, and chicken), her un-holy constant talk about Jesus (they say that as Mormons they are to saintly to call Jesus by his name…but I don’t remember the Mormon church ever teaching that). Their cruelty broke her heart, but she didn’t want their pity, she wanted their love, and so, I alone knew she had breast cancer, she said of over 240 children and grandchildren, I alone she could talk to, I alone she could trust.
Her last year was the hardest, the cancer spread to her liver, and her bloodstream, she lost the ability to walk, the thing she had done the most in her life. Me and my three (than infant) brothers stayed with her. Only J1 was old enough to remember Grammy, but just barely. Those last few months I cooked, cleaned, and feed my grandmother. All the while she continued without end writing letters and calling on the phone, begging her children and grandchildren to visit her. Finally one week before Thanksiving she invited all of them to Thankgiving Dinner at her house…telling them she’d even let them cook a turkey if that’d get them to come…on the phone with her favorite son, he laughed at her request…my Dad in a rage took the phone and yelled “If you don’t come now you’ll never see her again, the doctors say she’s only got a few days left.” than hung up on them. That one uncle was on the next plane to Maine, soon followed, by the son and daughter, that lived here in Maine (both lived only a few streets away for Grammy), and one daughter from Utah also came….no one else. She died 1:00 AM in the morning on Thanksgiving Day, never getting her wish to see her children and grandchildren one last time. Those that came were the pooest in the family, and could not afford a funeral, together all we could afford was a plot next to her baby that had died so many years ago. We could not afford a coffin or a headstone, and she was buried in a cardboard box. With only us and the few sons and daughters that showed up. Less than 12 people, in a family of 246+. Later, out of grief at not coming when she had asked, one son bought a tomb stone which says “Have I told you lately that I love you?”, saying that were ever she was he hoped that she could forgive him. It was a quite a contrast to all the expensive pomp and circumstance of Grandpa’s extravagant Mormon funeral last summer. Grammy’s last Thanksgiving was a day of rejoicing for the Mormons of the family, and exactly 6 months later they celebrated as the baptism of the dead was preformed in the Salt Lake Temple. Grammy was so sweet and gentle, so innocent and loving, her mind never reached adult hood, she was never able to live or act like an adult, living forever in the blissful mind of a child, it was her simple ways that I loved her for, and yet it was her simple ways that her children were ashamed to admit they were related to her for, shame that over the years grew to outright hate.
Today those same relatives are ashamed of me, like Grammy, they call me the child of Satan, they say that when Grammy died her evil spirit possessed me. Unlike them I was never ashamed of Grammy, unlike them I learned to accept her for who she was. Grammy was for many years, my best friend, and I am ever thankful that I knew her, for she taught me to look at the world through the eyes of a child, to enjoy the simple things in life…the flowers, the trees, the rain, God’s glorious creation, she taught me to treat everyone as equals…wither they be rich businessmen, the homeless on the streets, animal, or child…she belied that Jesus loved them all just the same good or bad and that we should strive to love as Jesus did. I am who I am today because I had a schizophrenic grandmother who loved everything and everyone with a childlike innocence, and took the time to find happiness in everything in life be it good or bad.
This entire post is dedicated to and written in memory of ..
Eva Viola Atwater
Mother to many; Friend to all.
February 21, 1921 - Thanksgiving Day 1994
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