Thanksgiving

Jennie Brownscombe's 'First Thanksgiving'

Happy Thanksgiving!

Tonight I was asked, with about 10 minutes warning, to give a short speech about the history of Thanksgiving in the US in front of about a hundred people with a purpose of tying together the themes of unity and gratitude.  I thought about Peter Willard saying, "Always be ready to....."

Gratitude, in Bangla, is 'shogotom'.   To say, "I'm grateful", you say, "Amar onek shogotom ache."
The interesting thing about the grammar is, were you to try and translate it back to English literally, it would be roughly: "There is a great deal of gratitude of/to me".  What fascinates me about this is that gratitude is external to us, as though we are recipients or conduits of this other thing, this gratitude, that we are experiencing.