As I did the last two years, I am reprinting another of Joan Beck’s Thanksgiving columns. I do not know how many years she wrote them. I have copies of those from 1985 through her last column in 1998. In 2009 I reprinted her column from Thanksgiving 1998. Last year I reprinted the column form 1989. This year I am reprinting the first column I have, the one from 1985:
“As we gather together to count the Lord’s blessings, 364 years after the first Thanksgiving Day, we are grateful, O God, for summits and summers and sunshine and Sundays, for a 1464 Dow and a $3.9 billion GNP*, for the 12-0 Bears and their 307-pound rookie, for tax cuts if we get them and tax reform if it works.
Our Fathers’ God to Thee, author of liberty, we give thanks for robotics and fiber-optics and avionics, for microchips and chocolate chips and scholarships and courtship, for artificial bones and bonfires and bonuses and pro bon, for chapels and apples, for Twain and rain and fruited plains and for the love which from our birth over and around us lies.
For cars and cathedrals and ‘Cagney and Lacey.’ For teachers and preachers and all creatures, great and small, we thank Thee, dear Lord, who made them all. And for 90th birthdays, the 90th Psalm and the 19th hole, for LiveAid, licorice and libraries, for shaloms and slaloms and Shakespeare and shamrocks, for blood donors and Doonsbury and doggerel and down.
O God our help in ages past, our hope for years to come, we praise You for neighbors and horses and newborns and newspapers, for teddy bears and gummy bears, for bear hugs, and Bearnaise, for yuppies and Yosemite and yogurt and yule, for veggies and Venice and veterans and vets, for volunteers and vaccinations and Valentines and vespers.
‘I have a dream’ and ‘We shall overcome’ fill us with thankful thoughts this day, Dear Lord and Father of Mankind. So, too, do ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident’ and ‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddles masses yearning to breathe free’ and ‘It’s benign’ and ‘Your baby’s just perfect’ and ‘I now pronounce you husband and wife’ and ‘The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want’ and ‘You’re going to make it after all.’
O Lord our God, when we in awesome wonder consider all the worlds Thy hands have made, we thank you for comets and comics and comebacks and commencements, for comforters and common stock and condominiums and compacts, for homes and homers and homecomings and homemakers, for families and family planning and family doctors and family rates.
Eternal Father, strong to save, shoes arm hath bound the restless wave, we are grateful this day for the promises of genetic engineering and the hopes of Geneva, for geniuses, ‘General Hospital,’ geraniums and gender. For modems and mammograms and amazing grace, for chess and chestnuts, cheeseburgers and checks, and for fathers and forefathers and grandfathers and founding fathers, our thanks abound.
For sons and soup and soul and soap, for daughters and day dreams and data banks and daylight savings time, for rebates and rehab and reapers and readers, for détente and detergent, dentists and democracy, we thank Thee, God of grade and God of glory. And for whatsoever things are true, for evidence and things unseen, for a shelter from the stormy blast and for an eternal home, Ginnie Maes and gingerbread and gin rummy and jokes we list today as blessings, God of the Earth, the sky, the sea. We are grateful, too, for books and book stores and bonds and bongos, for mushrooms and museums and munchies and music, for smokers who quit and parents who don’t give up, for Edison, Einstein, elegies and elms, for elephants and electricity and eels and eggs.
Lord of all, to Thee we raise our Thanksgiving praise for brothers and mothers and significant others, for EMTs and IRAs and HMOs and VCRs, for Keoghs and zeros and heroes, and for dawn after dark, for healing after hurt, for rest after work and life after life, and most of all that ‘neither death nor life nor angels nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature shall be able to separate us from the love of God.’”
For those of you who may be interested, Joan Beck’s daughter, Melinda Beck, wrote an interesting article in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal: “Sole Survivors: Adult Orphans Preserve, Adapt Traditions”. You can find it here, at least as long as the link works.
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* I wonder if the number here is a typo. I don’t know.
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