Today is Thanksgiving. It's not our first as a married couple, but our seventh. It's not our first with our daughter, but our fourth. It is, however, the first time we cooked The Bird by ourselves---with a series of completely random events, we not only ended up cooking a full dinner, but cooking one for less people than we planned. (I fully expect to be heartily sick of turkey by next weekend :-P)

This was the first Thanksgiving that my daughter was old enough to begin to understand how the holiday originated (and, frankly, this is the one occasion where being a history geek really isn't a good thing.) I told her a simplified version, how those first colonists---all alone and starving---needed the help of others to survive. The larger moral, I've thought as I've gotten older, is that we're all interconnected to each other by our actions and our choices, that none of us should be too high or too mighty to realize we might need help come morning.

Which brings me to the grocery store. We ended up shopping at the last minute, not today, but yesterday...and because of the job which occasionally drives me insane, we had the money to buy the ingredients for the meal. Our local store has a food donation drive---basically, you buy a grocery bag with the dry ingredients for three meals inside (the prices vary,) and the grocery store donates it to a local food pantry. I didn't even blink when I picked up ours---it wasn't even a choice for me not to help, even a little bit---and there was a time when I would have, when I would have ignored the display and been too focused on what I was doing or where I needed to be.

But I have been in need---not that desperate kind of need where I couldn't feed my family (thank deities,) but need nonetheless, when I received help from people who could have chosen not to help...but didn't.

So today I give thanks, not only for my friends and my family, but for those experiences...because they taught me and bent me and shaped me.