The Timeliness of Gratitude

Alternatively, to be more profound, it ought to be, "The Timelessness of Gratitude". For most of North America timeliness of gratitude is the highlight of the month of November, specifically on the last Thursday.  That week is often one of, if not the busiest travel days  of the year. It is also just about a month before another important day that is celebrated across all nations that subscribe to the Christian faith.  Christmas, however, may have veered off a bit farther away from its original intended meaning when it seems to merely denote when people are thinking about whom to express their gratefulness, or to whom they will be grateful for in the aftermath of ripped wrappers, shredded ribbons and crumpled boxes heaped into a pile by late morning of the 25th. Those two months have become the highlights to outshine the rest of the year. That is when introspection can help us put everything in perspective.

Timeliness of gratitude must transcend the pages of the calendar. 

"Timelessness: the quality of not appearing to be affected by the process of time passing or by changes in fashion".  --- Oxford Dictionary 

The expression of gratitude should therefore neither be bound by time nor changes in lifestyle or social and cultural evolutions.  

Why then do we set only a particular segment of each year to be grateful?

Decades ago that now seems so far back in time, growing up in one of the central islands on a Pacific archipelago, a post war baby  nurtured by shell shocked parents in 1946, barely a year after the country's liberation was a phenomenon of nature filling a vacuum - labeled later by sociologists as the "baby boom era". To have survived the conditions brought on a population of parents reeling from the ravages of war was as much a phenomenal feat as it was miraculous. For millions of children from that generation around countless parts of the world ravaged by war, the miracle was to last a lifetime of gratitude.

Seven years after that island was liberated, those post war babies, having survived against all odds, were now first graders in the public school system. It would seem strange, even incomprehensible, by today's standards, that those children who up to that point in their lives knew only one language - that of their native tongue - found their first day at school looking at their first grade books completely written in English.

Odder still was the fact that the entire archipelago was a Spanish colony for three hundred years prior to 1898 when after the Spanish-American War, it became a U.S. colony (or commonwealth, depending on who looked at it at that time) when Spain gave it up along with Puerto Rico and Cuba (where the Spanish-American conflict started). However, the U.S. granted the archipelago its independence fifty years later in 1946, immediately after the war; whence, the first Filipino baby boomers were born. That explains why the first books they were handed on their first day of school were entirely in English - a holdover from the American educational system; every postwar school teacher a product of it.

Some of those young children would often spend some of their idle time watching by the shorelines as big foreign ships come and go. Those huge tankers came to load sugar and molasses. Sugar cane was the island's main agricultural crop.  They learned that their country was a huge exporter of sugar - the bulk of which headed for a "mythical" country far, far away.

And they all wondered what it was like to be in that far away land called America. 

Stranger still was that in elementary school they were taught to sing "America The Beautiful" and learned about Thanksgiving. They had no realistic grasp of "amber waves of grain" or "purple mountain majesties" but they sung the song with gusto anyway.  Even stranger was for those young kids to be singing "dashing through the snow", with  no earthly  way to imagine  "what fun it is to ride and sing a sleighing song tonight", when tropical weather was all they knew, even in December.  

I was one of those kids. 

Growing up in a seaside town, in a poor barrio, kids my age somehow survived malnutrition and post-war living conditions. Some of us continued to dream, however fantastical the idea was of ever leaving the island for that mythical land.

At the city plaza stood a monument. 

The monument honored the heroism of Private First Class (Pfc) Theodore C. Vinther, 185th Infantry Regiment, US Army. He enlisted at the age of 29, a bit older than most young men, in April, 1942, out of Berkeley, CA. Like so many young men of that time (some as young as 17) who volunteered for the war effort, they were shipped to foreign lands many of them may not even have heard of before then and fought to free so many they did not know.  Many of them did not come back.

The effort to liberate the Philippines was hard-fought in an island-to-island battle against the Japanese occupation. U.S. forces landed on the northeast side of one of the central islands before heading towards the city. A  bridge at a town several kilometers from the city had to be secured. 

"Vinther volunteered to be one of the men to cross the bridge, which was rigged with explosives, under enemy fire, to overtake the explosives control point. It was 5:00 am the morning of March 29, 1945. Vinther was mortally wounded at the bridge after killing two Japanese soldiers, one of whom was but a few feet from the electrical controls. The capture of this bridge sped the advance of the 40th Infantry Division by two days and took the Japanese by such surprise that they rapidly abandoned the City of Bacolod--they were unable to execute their plans to burn and destroy the city and to inflict pain and death on the civilians as they did in other cities of the nation". 

My parents lived in that city.  Who knows what could have happened to them if the American forces did not make it in time.  My mother later would recall when she saw the American soldiers walking along the rice paddies. She said they appeared to her like giants from another world.

Pfc. Vinther was buried at the Manila American Cemetery. Like thousands of U.S. soldiers who died in foreign lands, Pfc. Vinther occupied only a small cemetery plot. (Below is a photo of that cemetery).

There are twenty five American cemeteries in five continents, in ten foreign countries - from Belgium to Tunisia where 130,000 U.S. servicemen lay permanently buried.

Lest we forget, November is not just Thanksgiving month, it is also when we celebrate Veterans Day on November 11.

And so it was for one of those skinny boys by the shoreline watching those ships when three decades later his family of four  made it to that "mythical" place.  Our two sons, ages 5 and 6, who have not yet learned to speak English, were thrust into the public school system.  Their first day at school was the same way it was for me.  A little over a decade later, our eldest went to the U.S. Naval Academy, graduated and served as an officer in a nuclear submarine. A small token of gratitude to a generous nation.

And so it is that we ought to be reminded of the "timelessness of gratitude". Everyday is a gift.  We open a present each morning we wake up. If we set just one thing aside to be grateful for each day, we will find that there are way more than there are days in the year.  And we will find new ways to be grateful for everyday forward so there will be an endless accumulated number at each passing year. Hence, the timelessness of gratitude!

To one and all, I wish you,