Hard thing, “labor,” but not as bad as “toil.” But not as good as “work.”
Toil is punishment, not work. It can be a useful figure of speech though, in the sense that one has worked so hard that, to an untrained eye, the work would have seemed senselessly, gratuitously difficult, although actually the strenuous effort was necessary to accomplish a worthwhile goal.
“Work” is constructive effort and activity that enjoins the worker in a worthy cause and results in betterment of the worker.
One’s job might or might not include activities characterized as work in this constructive sense.
At many places, as little is left to chance as possible. An employee must adhere to a dress code. He is watched on camera all day, so not a single moment of his day is not recorded and subject to scrutiny and second guesses by management. An employee manual dictates exactly how the employee should perform in every conceivable situation. Individuality and creativity are expressly discouraged.
Work is a great burden for the majority. “Misfits are everywhere,” goes the Kinks song, and it’s really true. We constantly see commercials for fast food places I entirely avoid, because the reality is so depressing. I see the people who work there and the idea of going into that fast food restaurant and asking them to do something for me is thoroughly distasteful, because they don’t want to be there, wearing those silly clothes, making that lousy food, and I don’t want to add to their misery.
We are surrounded by people in those positions.
Grocery stores? When the employees go on strike, we hear about their miserable working conditions.
The single parents waiting on tables, a paycheck away from homelessness, dependent on tips.
Department stores, malls, gas stations, nail salons, all the businesses in strip malls, all those people working part time, without benefits, who can’t afford college and can barely afford their rent and car payments.
Everywhere, people who have wound up doing things for a living they never would have intended.
People who, every day, struggle to assert their dignity under difficult circumstances because they couldn’t possibly do otherwise.
Jesus was accused of many crimes by His enemies: blasphemy, breaking the Sabbath. “My father goes on working, and so do I,” He said.
So God wasn’t finished after six days. He is still working, because work is part of His identity. It is part of our identity as His children, created in His image.
Even if we can’t celebrate our paying jobs on Labor Day, we can celebrate the real work we do– all the constructive activity we undertake– being good, helpful, honest, compassionate people, having positive impacts– simply through being human.

A regrettable thing happened once at a place where I worked. One of those things that causes everyone to wonder exactly what happened and why it had happened, something that defied a ready explanation, and this profoundly frustrated the boss.
“Blame has to be fixed,” she said. I countered that if she insisted upon that without knowing for sure exactly what caused the problem, then “fixing the blame” on someone wouldn’t do any good at all. She would be able to explain it away to her boss as being the fault of so-and-so, but it would be a lie, and how would she like it if it happened to her?
In another scenario, she would say, “Those dead children? Those dead farm animals? The house that burned down? All your fault, Job. You should have had police watching the neighborhood, and better fences around your fields, and you shouldn’t have built your house in such a windy place. None of those things has ever happened to me because I haven’t made mistakes like you’ve made, Job. I’m really sorry for your problems, Job, but I’d be lying if I didn’t tell you the truth, and the truth is, all that was your fault.”
“Is it my fault,” Job reflects, “that I live in a cruel world with cruel people and unimaginable misfortune?”
Some people insist on fixing blame, even on themselves, because that’s preferable to admitting that they don’t know why something went wrong. Something goes wrong, and there has to be an explanation, with the idea that the mistake can be avoided next time.
An employee is laid off because the board of directors decrees budget cuts, so the last person hired is the first person fired, and even this person thinks, “If only I was more attractive. If only I’d been nicer to the boss. If only I’d moved more product. If only I’d done better, I wouldn’t have been fired.” Blame has been fixed by the friends of Job who live inside her head. The worst of it is, maybe they’re right!
When a corporation earns profits, often it doesn’t matter how, or why. Credit must be fixed, so the CEO is rewarded with a bonus equal to the combined salaries of half his workforce, with bonuses also allocated to the vice presidents and such. Maybe the company has been relocated to another country with much lower operating costs and labor wages, so the local workers are fired and left destitute, but the stockholders profit.
“This is actually all for your own good,” the stockholders tell the unemployed peasants at the food bank. “Now you can get retraining at the local college and learn new jobs so you can get better jobs in the modern economy.”
But college is too expensive and financial aid isn’t available. “It’s the government’s fault,” say the college administrators.
“It’s the voter’s fault,” say the politicians.
“It’s the politicians fault,” say the unemployed workers.
“It’s the union’s fault,” say the board of directors and the executives.
“It’s our fault,” say the hungry children, “that my parents can’t put enough food on the table.”
“It’s God’s fault,” say the bitter parents.
Was it Job’s fault that he suffered, and was he responsible for the good fortune he enjoyed later? I don’t know. That’s the story, and we accept it on its own terms, and try to learn something from it.
“Where did it all go wrong?” I’ve been known to ask. “When did it all begin to turn around for the better?” is a question I ask that is equally difficult to answer, because there’s no knowing the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns.
Sometimes we think we are at fault, when we are not, and sometimes we think we are not, but we are.
We all have friends who could have been the friends of Job, and with such friends, we don’t need enemies, but we all have them all the same. Having such friends and enemies, we should have empathy enough to simply, quietly suffer with those who suffer that we might share in their joy when at last we know the truth, and when, at last, the righteous are rewarded.

I said I wanted to know everything about everything when I took a new job as a gardener. Discovering I know little about anything has been embarrassing.
What is in the gardens that make up the garden?
Dirt. But what kind of dirt? Where does one get that dirt, and when and how does one apply it? What does one add to the dirt to fortify the plants one puts in it? Is there adequate drainage, sunlight, shade, for the garden one wishes to grow in a certain place?
There are places in Ballard and West Seattle to buy certain types of rocks and dirt. We have a giant diesel truck. To be a gardener, one has to be able to drive this giant truck and park it without crashing into and crushing other vehicles and buildings.
At the garden, one has to drive the John Deere E-Gator, maneuvering it through tight spots and dodging in and out of street traffic and pedestrians, without crashing into the bollard lights that line the pathways of the gardens.
A gardener needs the right clothes. Gardener pants have extra pockets rightly sized for gardening tools, with padded knees for all the time kneeling in gravel and dirt. His shirt should be expendable, with pockets, and long sleeves to protect against sunburn, thorns and venomous insects.
Boots should be at least somewhat waterproof, light enough to leave little trace and not weigh one down after a long day of walking around carrying heavy stuff.
Don’t forget sunscreen, a hat, and a water bottle.
Look at the whole garden, and discern the intent of the architects and the caretakers of the institution. The garden you have is the garden they want. Maybe they don’t want elaborate topiary or the meticulous precision of a Japanese garden.
What are the trees and plants in the garden? Each has a name– more than one name– and much splitting of hairs has been done among so many plants that look so similar in the shapes of their leaves, the shades of their greens, the deployment of their branches.
Which are natives, and which are invasives? What exactly are they doing in which parts of the garden?
Growing up between concrete steps that descend an immaculate green lawn, horsetail will not be tolerated, but in the bioswale along the waterfront, eradication is not an option. There, it will be watched, as we watch the fireweed, willows, and blackberries, lest any one plant become, in an unseemly way, dominant.
Dandelions proliferate in the aspen grove. One has a vision of a forest floor pocked with ugly holes after the dandelions have been uprooted, but the gardener takes care to tend to each dandelion so that the only surface disturbed is as small as the size of the root where it passes from the air into the earth.
Above one’s head, a branch from one tree has somehow tangled itself with a branch of a neighbor, so one can separate the two so there is no conflict and each tree can proceed unimpeded, the way a galaxy has its own space, though sometimes collisions are inevitable.
No one can tell that a gardener has been at work, but the trees are at peace, and dandelions and other blemishes have been removed. A cheerfully robust patch of moss springs up, no longer weighed down by dandelion leaves, and a fern is seen in its full glory, no longer crowded by faded dandelion heads.
Gravel has been raked out of the shallow dirt bowls where the grass hasn’t uniformly grown. Weeds, in their groups of three and four, have been lifted, roots and all, out of the gravel path. With a hand rake, a slight disturbance of the gravel suffices to loosen the root. Unless one knew those weeds had been there, they wouldn’t be missed. No one would know a gardener had been at work.
Unless one had seen that blackberry vine up in that Douglas fir, no one would know that a gardener had climbed into the lower tree branches and traced that vine all the way to the root, then carefully pulled it, tip first, through the tree, so as to minimize the tearing of the thorns through the fir branches.
In a green wall of snowberry, a tourist sees some lovely bright purple fireweed flowers abuzz with bumblebees, a scenario approved and left alone by a gardener who wrestles with the scorched earth policy often preached against fireweed and other invasive plants.
Late in the afternoon, a visitor notices a long steel gardening implement among a thick groundcover of kinnikinnick. “Looks like a gardener forgot his tool,” she observes. “A gardener in a garden like this must have a lot on his mind, I would think!”

Not exactly the Nobel Prize or the Academy Awards, but August 10th is the day of the year I begin a new year of saying the daily Rosary, with a new intention.
The choice was easier in simpler times of days gone by.
With no immediate family nearby and no apparent prospects for the future, sometimes the intention was obvious. I would look within myself, and around at the world, and decide.
With both parents dead, I should pray for them. Certain desperate places in the world cry out for prayer. I’d wonder if my heart need forever remain a moribund thing of stone. How could I not pray for my own flesh and blood?
After reciting the Rosary, I recall every intention I’ve had and remain mindful of the work that remains toward accomplishing the results my prayers were meant to help achieve.
Not so simple anymore, life.
As today approached, weeks away, days away, hours away, I tried to listen closely to my conscience, to the most urgent whispers, to decide what this year to focus upon.
Which of three things: something my wife and I hope for, or for a change of circumstances for someone in dire need of positive changes and good luck, or for the establishment of a lasting foundation for myself in a new field I’ve just entered into which could settle the details of the remaining 20 years of my work life?
Obviously, the first thing cannot be dismissed, because it’s not just me, it’s my wife and I, and our child, and a possible sister or brother for our firstborn. But the second option isn’t speculative, or meant to supplement positive factors already in place– it’s meant possibly to divert disaster and radically change someone’s course for the better, possibly with exponentially positive, self-perpetuating offshoots that would be a boon to a wide circle of people. And the third option would be a prayer of thanksgiving and also somewhat of desperation from one who cannot take anything for granted, who knows full well that any good fortune that falls into my hands, might, in a forgetful moment, drop.
The solution is in the Rosary: the Joyful Mysteries, the Sorrowful Mysteries, the Glorious Mysteries. Sunrise is a joyful mystery, the excessive heat of the Summer midday Sun in these days of global warming is a sorrowful mystery, and a cool, beautiful sunset can be a glorious mystery, especially when the full Sturgeon Moon rises during the Perseids meteor shower. One life, with many aspects, one year of prayer, one Rosary, of many aspects.
My wife and I hope to experience a new joyful mystery, so I will pray for that during those five decades. For my friend undergoing severe trials, I will pray the Sorrowful Mysteries, and to celebrate my personal good fortune and emphasize my need to work hard toward a positive judgment upon my efforts, I will pray the Glorious Mysteries.
Maybe next year, the choice will be easier!

Hypersensitivity leads to problems for the especially delicate youth in our schools, even Catholic schools. I blew my top when my younger brother brought home a letter from his Catholic school that requested parental help in the project to shape the kids into “Christ-like” kids. The kids would be graded. I brandished this form in the face of our long-suffering mother and demanded she protest! She didn’t. I defended my brother against this insane doomsday weapon our school was about to launch at him and his little band of hellions. (They were hellions. They did things I won’t publish 30 years later. Worse things than my little band of delinquents did, which involved potatoes, cars, fast little legs, hiding places, a backyard chicken coop, and the darkness of night. Chuckle!)
“Christ-like” has always mystified me, the same way I’m puzzled as to exactly how I can be harsh on myself, but easy on others; how I should pray all the time, but not jabber “like the pagans do.”
How can we love the God we cannot see when we cannot love the person we do see? John says, impossible. I’m not sure it is impossible. A friend once said it’s easy to love the rain when you’re inside, and it’s easy to say you love people when you’re home by yourself. That’s more realistic than disingenuous. We all have our ideals we struggle to live up to.
When we see the poor, the homeless, the suffering faces, we see the Christ Who hungered, Who had the food (and therefore the hunger) His disciples didn’t know about, the Christ Who relied on the kindness of a Samaritan lady at a well, the Christ Who allowed the legion of demons to infest a field full of pigs so they ran off a cliff, and then was Himself run out of town.
When we see the misunderstood, we see the Christ Who was without honor among His own family, in His hometown.
At Mass this morning, the priest mentioned that Christ was beloved of God, and that we are all Christ-like because we are all beloved of God. That’s the best explanation I’ve heard of that idea.
A paradox of love is its blindness. People do horrible things, and their parents can’t believe it. “We made little Graham promise us he’d be a good boy,” XTC sings in “No Thugs In Our House.”
Love seems close-minded that way. One has a vision of who someone is, and interprets everything the beloved person does from that bias.
Love can also survive the eventual intrusion of reality into the picture, so that one can hate the sin, but love the sinner.
To love as God loves, as this priest explained that God loves each of us, is to be open-minded and generous, to accept in faith that any person is worthy (if not apparently deserving) of being treated with the dignity that God gives us and never takes away.
Once, a great rabbi visited a school. Some skeptical students wanted to test him. “Recite the 3rd chapter of Deuteronomy while standing on one foot with your hands behind your back!” they demanded.
“Fools!” the rabbi rebuked. “You haven’t even learned that you shouldn’t treat someone in a way you wouldn’t want to be treated. How can anyone teach you anything?”
Back in school, we kids, of course, were harsh critics of our teachers, as they were of us.
United in failure, united in struggle, may we have mercy on each other, and may God have mercy on us all!

“Where did he go?” I sometimes wonder. I realize I haven’t seen someone at work in a long time, and wonder, whatever happened to so-and-so?
The big shots have tributes and farewell parties. They send farewell e-mails to “All,” and in the privacy of their cubicles, their friends shed tears and their enemies rejoice.
Sometimes a co-worker dies. I’ve been shaken to find out I’ll never see a certain person again, and find it odd that so often we come to the most decisive moments with no inkling whatever. It’s sad to think that he had worked there for 20 years, and surfed the Internet on the computer, and sat in that same stall in the bathroom countless times, but when he did those things for the very last time– when he turned in his keys and walked out that door, thinking he’d do the same things tomorrow– he had no idea that all that was finished.
Other people know well in advance how their retirement will play out. “Ten more years,” he thinks. Then, one more year, one more month, one more day…. It’s fun to talk with someone going through that. “Just think– this is your last time to walk across this floor on your way to your office!” She smiles, nods, and laughs. “How great it must be to know that,” I think, knowing there’s always the chance that I myself have arrived here to work for the very last time. If the giant human-eating crows from outer space invade Earth today, maybe none of us will be going to work tomorrow.
Maybe it’ll be a giant earthquake. An asteroid. Mount Rainier could blow its top. A tsunami could strike. A catastrophe at home.
But one must plan for the future. “Inshallah.” “God willing.” One needn’t say those things to deeply know how they are so true.
A lucky break might bring things to a sudden end.
Good luck is not a cloud that does not have a black lining, though. It’s akin to a great fallacy of sports analysis, wherein commentators imagine that if only that player hadn’t been picked off base, he would have scored when the next batter hit a home run. That’s easy to say, and the picked-off base runner has every reason to take that as true, but if he hadn’t been picked off, the dynamics of the game would have been different enough that the pitcher probably wouldn’t have thrown that same pitch that got hit for the home run, and the batter would not have been in the same frame of mind that prepared him to hit the home run.
So an observer can think, “What good luck for so-and-so! Now he can enjoy what he has and proceed with his life, knowing he is the type of person who has what he now has.”
Not true. He is the same person he was before his good fortune, except that now he has the burden of trying to justify his good luck by living as if he deserved it, which is the same thing as expecting him to live as if he had accomplished something he might have liked to accomplish, but never actually did.
If you can then live as a responsible custodian of your good fortune, you can respect yourself as someone who has been prepared by life to have the good character, sound judgment and common sense to not squander an opportunity.
Luck is not a thing we can be certain of, be it ostensibly good or bad, because we never know whether things are ultimately to the good, or bad, as one might have an all-encompassing vision of our places in the spacetime inclusive of now, then, and hereafter.
Within the overarching reality encompassing us all in unknown causes and effects, cosmology and eschatology, it’s refreshing to have an occasional moment of clarity to savor– school is out! To leave a job for the last time, and happily imagine others thinking, “Whatever happened to that guy who always used to be there?”

The kitchen door is open so the dog and the kid can run back and forth, indoors and outdoors, so flies fly back and forth, indoors and outdoors, at suppertime, with food on the table, so the flies alight on the food, taking off with tiny morsels, landing, doing whatever they do on the surfaces they land on.
“There’s your dinner!”
Well, great. By the time I get to it, flies have been swarming around it for 15 minutes, and we all know, where flies land, that’s where maggots come from.
Some days, one’s mood is such that one is repulsed by this and cannot eat the food, because maggots might already be nascent within the food, because I don’t know how long it takes for maggots to be born, but I know it’s fast, and even if that’s not a plausible, decisive issue, we all know where flies’ feet have been, and whatever they wipe their feet on is immediately unclean and gross.
At the Last Judgment, perhaps God will say, “Who here regarded maggots as gross?”
If any hands don’t go up, “You!” God will say. “I know you thought maggots were gross!” Every hand will be raised.
Off in the distance, on a silver cloud, 144,000 maggots will be in attendance, each with a little golden halo.
Those designated for this Purgatory will sheepishly, solemnly, slowly make their way to the silver maggot cloud. Before each maggot, each person will implore, “Forgive me!” and each maggot will happily squeak, “I forgive you!”

The ants showed up in our kitchen one day. From under the floor, they crawled up and helped themselves to our crumbs.
“Our” crumbs? I include the ants in that collective pronoun.
Were these ants newcomers? Travelers? Or had they been here all along, dormant for whatever reason beneath the tiles, between the tiles and whatever is between the tiles and the Earth, perhaps “in that quiet Earth?”
I don’t like killing ants. Neither does my wife. But these were tiny things, so easily squishable, and there was nothing else to do with them unless we allowed them an unhindered run of the place.
The Indian filmmaker, Satyajit Ray, shows domestic scenes of Indian life I’ll always remember because of their radical difference from American domestic life. I remember a scene of a house with an interior courtyard. Pigeons nested near the roof, and flew back and forth, and walked around the house. I’d never seen anything like that.
In my experience, any alien life in a house– a spider, a fly, an ant– is unwelcome and alarming. Not accepted or tolerated.
Between inside the house and the outdoors should be an unpassable line. Humans inside, everything else– out.
But these ants in the kitchen– who could say how long they had been on the property? Is there any expanse of property that does not have ants? If they had been on the property all along, who were we to say that we were committed to their final annihilation simply because we didn’t want them in “our” house?
We found that mint deters them, so we put some around the places they emerged. It’s been a long time since we’ve seen any inside.
States have that in common with houses. The political powers of a state will claim the property, and define who belongs, and who doesn’t.
A common story of the last century is about how the indigenous people of some place were inconvenient and undesirable to another people, who had the advantages of wealth and military power. The stronger group would try to wipe out the weaker. That would be the end of that.
Time and again, a military defeat of indigenous people proved impossible in Ireland, India, Algeria, Vietnam, Afghanistan– anywhere and everywhere.
In the US, the native peoples were confined to sorely inadequate reservations, to the ongoing detriment of the natives and to the everlasting shame of the people who put them there and the people who continue to perpetuate the neglect of their rights and deny them the resources they need.
In Iraq, Egypt, Syria, Gaza, the West Bank– more places than not– people are singled out, isolated, and mistreated because they are somehow out of step with the majority, or the powers that be, who separate citizens into first-class and second-class citizens.
There is no first-class citizen, or nationality, that is made so because it has relegated other people to second-class status.
There are no military solutions to the social problems that come with the governance of a diverse population.
Where people historically live, where they are born and die, it’s arbitrary politics to say they don’t have the right to be there.
A military solution is never a definitive, ideal solution. Not even with an ant.

It’s that Moon of the year again– Ramadan!
Observance of Ramadan is one of the precepts of Islam, and, ideally, includes another precept– the pilgrimage to Mecca.
From the sighting of the crescent Moon, Ramadan begins and lasts until the sighting of the next crescent Moon.
The daily rigor of Ramadan begins at sunrise. Until sunset, Muslims abstain from food, drink, and sexual indulgence. That can be taken literally, though of course, there is more to food and drink than eating and drinking, and more to sexual indulgence than what can be accomplished by the constituents of the body.
Ramadan is calculated by the lunar cycle, so it begins ten or so days earlier every year. That doesn’t mean much near the equator, but here up north, it’s huge to the point where I wonder how they manage.
Why aren’t Indians soccer players? Too hot. Why aren’t Eskimos Muslims? Because one can’t observe Ramadan when the Sun never sets.
One could say, we’ll do Ramadan according to the solar schedule of Mecca. That would be a fair compromise, I would say, if it was suggested by someone desperate to keep Ramadan but prevented from that by the sheer length of days at this time of year in this part of the world. Although, eating a single peanut and sipping the smallest drop from a Dixie cup during Ramadan while the Sun is up would be as psychologically unthinkable as eating a Cadbury cream egg on Good Friday.
It’s only 28 days, you think. An even four weeks. After a single week, you’re 25% of the way through. Before sunrise one can eat all one wants, although with the Sun rising before 5:30, after the short night of sleep that follows an exhausting day of deprivation, one would need all one’s rest to face the oncoming day.
After the Sun rises, no more coffee. No sugar. No breath mints. Everybody in the office is going out to lunch at a place you’ve always wanted to go before it closes down for good in a week, but you can’t have anything.
After sunset comes the elaborate meal to celebrate the breaking of the fast, and that means enduring all the hoopla when all you want to do is have a good meal in peace and quiet when it’s almost bedtime after a long, grueling day.
Ramadan is difficult in The Great Northwest. One is surrounded by people who are mostly tolerant and non-judgmental, but we also seem to be eating, drinking, and even sexually/sensually indulgent (i.e., our Summer fashions) all the time.
We have our mountains and forests and all sorts of opportunities for the most active of lifestyles, physically and culturally, but these things can be distractions for believers. We have a mild climate, between the equator and the North Pole, but wild variations in the lengths of days. One could live here for 20 years, while Ramadan takes place from October through March, and have a relatively easy time of it, or one could live here while Ramadan happens during the other six months of the year and have about as difficult a time of it as anyone ever has.
One day at work I was in the break room with a Muslim friend. A box of doughnuts was on the table. As we finished our doughnuts, he said, “Oh, crap! It’s Ramadan!”
Pray for our brothers and sisters, the Muslims, especially during Ramadan!

Happy 4th of July!
As the only Summer holiday (Labor Day is in September, which feels like Autumn) and the holiday of American independence, a heavy load weighs upon the 4th, but it’s Summer, so we have the whole great outdoors to spread out our picnic blankets and umbrellas and enjoy all this.
“America” contains an endless variety of contrasts and contradictions, but the 4th is a joy and a celebration. Not a day passes without somber thoughts about the state of the nation, the world, and the planet, and our shortcomings as individuals, as a nation, as world citizens, but we would be amiss not to take some time to focus on the positive.
This is the land of Alaska and Hawaii, polar bears and palm trees, deserts and rain forests, cowboys and Indians.
Immigrants settled in the Appalachians, and Cajun country, and were forcibly brought in chains from Africa. In these lands, these people play what The Blasters sang about: blues, folk, jazz, country, R & B, rockabilly, soul, rock ‘n roll, rap, house, hip hop: American music.
Under one flag: Wall Street and Woodstock, Mormons, Hippies, Earth First!, the Tea Party, Al Capone and John Brown, Walt Whitman and Alice Walker, Sojourner Truth and Robert Johnson, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Chief Joseph, Humphrey Bogart and Handsome Dick Manitoba, Ansel Adams and the A-Bomb, Aretha Franklin and Frank Zappa, Porter Wagoner and Pee Wee Herman, Dr. Spock and Dr. Seuss, Prohibition and legal marijuana, Gram Parsons and graham crackers, Amazon and meth labs, Cap’n Crunch, the Captain & Tennile, football, baseball, and basketball.
America is a work in progress.
How do we finetune the economy so the poor don’t always have to get poorer and poorer?
How do we protect ourselves at home, and how do we use our wealth, military, and influence for the betterment of not just ourselves, but the world as a whole?
How do we know who our true friends are?
How do we take care of our old folk without slighting our youth of the necessary educational, health, and financial resources?
How do we improve our national infrastructure and expand and maintain our wildlife and wilderness?
How do we welcome the masses who brave every threat and danger to have the same opportunities we have?
As an American, I believe this nation believes in the individual and brings out (OK, sometimes the worst) the best in people, so I’ll wave the flag and shoot off fireworks with a beer in one hand and a hamburger in the other, thankful that I’m an American!