The guy was sitting outside a coffee shop looking through photos on his cell phone. Our friends knew him, and after 30 seconds or so of “Hi, how you doing?” and “Doing ok,” we were introduced.
As it turned out, the guy was from California.
“Looking at pictures of my family,” he said, pointing at his cell phone.
He ran his forefinger across the cell-phone screen, revealing picture after picture, memory after memory.
“I don’t get to see them anymore. Not even the grandkids. They just cut me off completely,” he said, holding the cell phone like it was a precious family photo album. I guess it was.
I will never forget those words or the look on the guy’s face. He appeared to be in his early to mid 70s, all tan from spending most of his time these days way down south.
“What’s going on?” my friend asked. “You don’t see any of them?”
The guy lifted his right hand and moved it to his upper left arm, mimicking giving himself a shot. In this case, a vaccine.
“I refused to get the (COVID) shot, so now they won’t speak to me – none of them,” he said of his family.
“They won’t let you see your grandkids?” my friend asked.
The guy answered with a nod of his head and tucking his upper lip over his lower lip.
This time of year, with Thanksgiving days away, I normally write a column about being thankful. I have written about veterans coming home for the holidays, Black Friday and memories of going to my grandparents’ homes for turkey and dressing and pumpkin pie.
Not this year.
Yes, we still have plenty to be thankful for, but too much of our world has become an abrasive, unforgiving, unrelenting, accusatory, cruel, indifferent, barbaric, uncaring, my-way-or-the-highway place to be.
I know. That’s not a happy Thanksgiving message, but we can change things if we do our part.
We can’t do much about beheadings, massacres and racial strife half a world away, but wouldn’t it be nice if we could have peace on earth on our little piece of Earth. Just about now some folks have quit reading this column – no controversy, no crime, no new store opening, no tale of a coach who is paid $26,301 a day for eight years to hit the road – and, most likely they are the ones who need to heed the lyrics of the great 1969 Beatles’ tune, “All You Need is Love.”
When you think about it, that really is all you need to fix a lot of what’s broken. Need a higher authority than the Beatles? The New Living Translation of the Bible includes the word love 645 times. “Love thy neighbor,” is one of my personal favorites.
If love were truly in play, we would not have human trafficking in our backyard. We would not have homeless people, period, so we would not have to fight about what to do with them. With love, a man and woman would not have starved a 10-year-old girl to death in her padlocked bedroom. We’d love the drag queens as much as the drag racers.
In case you didn’t read between the lines in the previous paragraph, take note that every heartbreaking story, every battle, doesn’t happen half a world away.
We focus on Hamas, Russia and all the horrendous stories we see and hear thanks to the proliferation of news available to us. That news is made more unreliable, divisive, thanks to social media and agenda-packed major news outlets and podcasts. But I am not about to blame social media and video games for the gut-wrenching stories I see. Nor will I blame gun manufacturers for the six-year-old who shot his teacher this month.
We got a people problem. We got a love problem.
Anyway, happy Thanksgiving. And as you slice the turkey, stir the gravy and bless the food, remember to not only pray thankfully for the 14-pound bird, but pray that love gets spread a lot farther and wider around not only our great big world, but the streets and rural routes we live on.
About now we could all use a healthy dose of divine intervention with our turkey and dressing. And along with that love, we could also Try a Little Tenderness (Three Dog Night, 1968).
