OPINION:
I was born on Chicago’s south side, a stone’s throw from the stockyards, in a melting-pot neighborhood. It was a place that did not have the word poverty in its vernacular. We lived in a cold-water, walk-up apartment quite typical for the type of neighborhood; a four- or five-story, wooden-frame building with four flats opening onto a common hallway on each floor. Our unit didn’t have a front door (it had been missing for longer than any of the residents could recall). The doorway into the hallway was closed off with a patchwork quilt nailed to the upper edge of the door frame, and it extended a foot or so beyond both sides to ensure some privacy.
The quilt was replete with the odors of previous years: the sage dressing of last Christmas, the toast that had burnt on the stove-top toaster several months before, the candles from the scorched pumpkin of last Halloween. Baths were on Saturday evenings in a large, galvanized wash tub that hung, when not in use, from a nail on the back-porch wall.
To this day I can close my eyes and vividly recall the feeling of the frigid linoleum-covered floor beneath my feet when I was the first out of bed on those coldest of winter mornings, and the sensation of the first semblance of heat radiating from the recently lighted heater.
This Thanksgiving, as in all of the years since my early childhood, I will pause to thank God, the great architect of the universe, for the abundance of blessings I have had in my time: freedom, opportunity, a wonderful military career, a family-business career, a secure home, a loving wife and family with children. grandchildren and great-grandchildren, friends and loved ones.
And this year more than any other year I feel an overwhelming gratitude and appreciation that I didn’t have a federal program to lock me into the life I was born into.
BOB WORN
Pritchett, Texas
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