Happy Thanksgiving y’all. For all of my American friends and followers, I hope you are somewhere warm and welcoming with friends and family around you, or at the very least somewhere where you are comfortable and can find some joy in the day. For my international friends and followers, I wish you a happy Thursday, but hope wherever you are you can find some time today to count your blessings and realize how much you have to be thankful for. This is something I am trying to start incorporating into my everyday routine, not something I reserve for one day in November.
For those of you who have to work today, believe me - I’ve been there. I’ve spent many years working in restaurants on the holidays. It was never a bad thing, but I was always a little surprised that people didn’t tip more on the holidays. If you find a restaurant open, remember that someone has had to give up their holiday to take care of you and you should be sure you take care of them. In my career as a guide, I also spent many years on the road during the holidays. I’ve celebrated Thanksgiving on the beach in Key Largo, in the snow in Stowe, Vermont, at Grand Canyon, in San Diego and probably plenty of other places I’ve now forgotten about. I enjoyed having groups to share the day with and sometimes cooked a traditional American Thanksgiving Day feast if the facilities were available. Cooking that kind of a meal for 14 people is quite the challenge - and if you only have a camp stove and an open fire even more-so. It’ s nice to be able to share your culture with people from abroad though, and Thanksgiving is one of the best days to do that in America.
This year, I’m very thankful to be home with my friends and family and to be able to celebrate the holiday with the people I care most about. I’m also thankful to have some time and internet access to get some work done while I’m here. I’ve been enjoying playing a lot of catch-up these last few weeks, trying to get this site in order, complete some projects that are long overdue and start to plan for the future. One of the things I’ve really been working on is my Gallery pages. I’ve been able to clean up, organize and add to three of my photo galleries over the last week or so, and I’d love it if you wanted to pop over and have a look. Here are the links where you can find them:
Louisville’s Cave Hill Cemetery was dedicated in 1848 and is the final resting place for over 120,000 people. During the Victorian Era and in a time before city parks were as prevalent as they are today, “garden cemeteries” were often designed and promoted for recreational activities. People would stroll down the winding lanes and maybe have a picnic by the lake. I like this idea and have always seen beautiful cemeteries as a nice place to walk and think and ponder life and death, a place to consider and draw from generations of people who came before us. Funerary art and statues are remarkable and often overlooked as a true art form. I spent several hours in Cave Hill over two visits, neither under the best of conditions for photography, but it was beautiful nonetheless. You will see photos of some of the famous people buried there like Colonel Harland Sanders, Muhammad Ali and Louisville founder George Rogers Clark. There are also lesser known people like Harry L. Collins, who was the official magician of Frito-Lay and Nicola Marschall who designed the official flag and uniforms of the Confederacy. Cave Hill is also a National Cemetery with graves for both Union and Confederate war veterans. It is a beautiful place to visit and was high on my list of sites I wanted to see in Louisville. I hope you enjoy my photos from Cave Hill.
I had just finished my workout at the Planet Fitness in Lexington, Kentucky and walked back into the locker room to get my things and head out and face the day. When I walked around the corner, I found Bill Thomas sitting in his wheelchair directly in front of my locker. He was waiting for me. Although we had never met before, there is no doubt in my mind that he was waiting for me. He looked up when I walked over and asked me how I was. I told him I was doing well and asked him the same question. “Every day I wake up is a good day, a blessed day” he responded. He offered me a granola bar, but I declined. I was in kind of a rush, but for some reason I felt like what Bill had to say was something worth listening to. Over the years, I’ve learned to trust my instincts and that day, as usual, they served me well. He leaned back in his chair and looked up at me and told me this story:
It was Sunday, May 5th, 2013 and he was just waking up. At 57 years old, he had his aches and pains, but nothing out of the ordinary. He figured he’d get up, make some breakfast, have a shower and maybe watch his favorite church programs on TV. He sat on the edge of his bed and pictured his quiet Sunday morning unfolding as it always had. He went to stand up and begin his day when everything went blurry and lost its shape. He closed his eyes and tried to shake it off but when he opened them again nothing had changed. He went to sit back down and collapsed.
