Thankful

I had the full-on pre-Thanksgiving busiest-travel-day-of-the-year experience yesterday. I was English department staff duty officer, so I made the rounds with the keys and the clipboard and made sure everything was locked up and secure in our building at COB, and then it was off to the races: drive across the Hudson to the train station, Metro North local rail into Grand Central, subway shuttle to Times Square and then the 1 train south to 37th and Penn Station, where I picked up Amtrak to DC on a train so full it wasn’t even worth bothering to look for a seat, and spent the whole trip grading papers in the café car. Throngs and lines and crushes of people everywhere, and I’m thankful today that it all went off relatively smoothly.

I’m thankful for other things, as well.

1. My students, who yesterday were even more high-spirited, engaged, smart, and dedicated than usual, but who always make my time in the classroom the best part of the job of teaching writing.
2. My new job, for the opportunity that it offers me to make a genuine difference in ways that I might not have elsewhere — an opportunity that I’ve been capitalizing on, about which I’ll have more to say soon.
3. My family, who I’m happy to be seeing after not having seen them for far too long.
4. Tink and Zeugma, who have a couple of competent cat-sitters looking after them in New York.
5. And, finally, before this gets too cloying, I’m grateful for my friend Jason’s invocation of those kindergarten crayon-drawn trace-the-hand Thanksgiving turkeys in this lovely bit of holiday snark:

Snarky or non-, I hope your Thanksgiving’s a good one.