Merrie H. Reagan

Thursday, November 6, 2025

Good Day. Everyone. Thanksgiving Day 2025 is three weeks from today. Below is an excerpt from Life Flashes: A Memoir chapter fifteen that expresses Thanksgiving meaning.  Hope all is well with you. Good wishes. Merrie H. Reagan.

 Thursday, November 25, 2010                   

For several hours this morning, Jura and I walked in woods. On this Thanksgiving Day morning, I sat on a chair facing a Pembroke table in the apartment kitchen, while reading and writing and alternately watching television, as dog Jura laid near me upon a living room rug. Unexpectedly, I decided to attend an early afternoon church-sponsored Thanksgiving Day dinner celebration that I had seen advertised. After driving to and entering the church dining hall, which seats approximately fifty people, and seeing ten strangers, most being volunteer staff, I suddenly became frozen, momentarily unable to move or to talk. All at once, everything hurt.

A volunteer named Pam approached me. Observing me compassionately at first, she then viewed me quizzically. I was unresponsive. Then she kindly asked me whether I wanted a hot or cold beverage. When I answered, she slowly walked away. She returned moments later holding a glass of water that I had requested, which she properly set on the dinner table.

Pam and I began conversing. Pain associated with personal losses that I am undergoing subsided, as did my flowing tears. When she and fellow volunteers finished serving dinner to about twenty-five guests, Pam sat down on a chair facing me. Pam, the husband of Pam, the two sons of the couple, Marion, and I, shared pleasant conversation and a delicious dinner and dessert, a meal that began and ended with a prayer of gratitude.

When the gathering ended, renewed humility, hope, and confidence entered me. Leaving the Thanksgiving feast found me realizing that one cannot fully appreciate living, when one does not accept spiritual homelessness that all creation shares. Singer Carrie Underwood captured universal homelessness, when she wrote and later publicly performed a song called “Temporary Home,” which topped the musical charts. The song was released in December 2009, nearly one year ago.

The beginning of the lyrics of “Temporary Home” depicts a young six-year-old boy who is being sent to “another new foster home, another new mom and dad, another new school, and another new house that will never be home.” As Carrie continues singing the self-composed ballad she vocalizes, “When people ask him how he likes this place, he looks and says with a smile upon his face, This is my temporary home; it’s not where I belong, (it’s) windows and rooms, that I’m passing through. This is just a stop on the way to where I’m going; I’m not afraid because I know, this is my temporary home.” The heartwarming and heart-wrenching song lyrics indicate that earthly living, including many paths of living, represents one stop leading toward where all creation is moving.