Grateful after Midnight

In the Kandowski home it's just past midnight and meatballs simmer in a pan of sauce where my lovely lady fans the exquisite aroma of good delectable eats everywhere. I'm grateful for the food this New Year's morning, the privilege of sharing it with a person whom I'm privileged to love and whom I'm doubly privileged loves me back. I'm grateful that my parents are alive and well, that my brother and sister-in-law eagerly await the birth of their first child, that my friends navigate the world smartly and humanely, that my cats have Dutch-boy haircuts and snore in their fuzzy sleeps. I'm grateful that Kafka wrote books in his lifetime which many of us have the fortune of reading, that Proust had his Madeline, that coffee served black does something to the drama in the color of morning, that the electric bass exists, that the guitar is by nature democratic, that conscience sometimes sticks. I'm grateful that one of my best friends tunes pianos instead of firing flash grenades, that another runs youth programs out of an arts library in Methville, Indiana, that I know a guy in Istanbul with crazy hair and fine aesthetic tastes, and another guy from whom songs pour like water from a faucet which, even when turned off, still drips. I'm grateful that I can still hold a 48 hour conversation with the horse thief who just returned from the Far East, that I have a new friend in an art teacher who finds beauty worthy of attention, another new friend in a chemistry teacher who knows his politics and can spin a wisely informed yarn, and still another new friend whom it feels I've known many years and writes stories like Mark Twain and skips stones like a toddler. I'm grateful my lady's dad treats me as he would a son, and my lady's brother is bedecked in neat tattoos. I'm grateful my dad paints portraits of his mind and my mother hangs them on the walls of their house. I'm grateful I don't suffer migraines and that I've the opportunity to fight the good fight in the classroom. I'm grateful the novel isn't dead, that Christopher Hitchens' untimely death gave rise to lovely eulogies, that Radiohead continues to experiment with sound, that Corporate America still sucks and I wasn't wrong on that one. I'm grateful to recognize how grateful I am to be alive and well, to be getting older, to have some hard-earned wrinkles that aren't pillow marks, to be inspired at the start of another year … grateful to have work that needs be done.