Tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day, O Lord, and we who are gathered here are aware we have much to be thankful for.

Not that we are in the best of health; we are not. Not that we have no anxieties or burdens to carry, we do. Not that all our days are easy and fulfilled, they are not. Nor that we do not feel a longing for days past, we do.

But we are thankful to be able to express these thoughts and understand they are but a part of the cycle of living: That we can feel alive, and look forward to days ahead, can still feel the uplift of spirit when good things come along, and above all, join in the companionship of family and friends.

We are grateful, O Lord, that we can still feel grateful.

As I’ve mentioned before, I randomly post invocations from the series my grandmother wrote for her synagogue’s senior citizens group. Often, I’m driving when it occurs to me that I haven’t published one in the past week or two.

This evening was one such occasion. Driving home, twenty days after writing a blog titled, “Reminded as to Why I Should be More Grateful,” it dawned on me that I should share another of her invocations.

I was amused to learn it dealt with gratitude! What struck me was the final statement, “grateful that we can still feel grateful.”

We experience emotions – whether positive or negative – with scarcely a thought about the miraculous capacity to have feelings. I look at my cats. They have about four emotions: Elation (usually tied to catnip), satisfaction (eating or laying in the sun), needy or grumpy. The latter two tend to dominate.

But as humans, we have a wealth of emotions that shape our lives. We have degrees of happiness and sadness. Jubilation when in love or holding a newborn. Heartbreak over a loss. Contentment after a good meal or spending time with good friends and family. We can be ambiguous or bewildered one moment and enlightened and confident the next.

Indeed, we should be grateful for the ability to feel, express, and experience the cycles of our lives.

It is said that we are the captain of our soul. That we alone plot the course, set the sail, and steer the tiller.

That is not so, we do not stand free to follow our charts. Our lives are entwined with the lives, the needs, even the demands of others.

There are times we are called upon to go where we don’t want to go; do what we don’t want to do; give more than is fair; be denied more than is just; to ask for less than we need; even to bear another’s burden.

As such times, O Lord, help us to hold back our angers; to accept, with grace and without rancor, what we cannot reject; to bend without breaking, and through it all to hold fast to the sanctity of our being, the worthiness of our lives, and to never relinquish to the full our station as captain of our soul — to hold onto the very last shred.

My grandmother was a remarkable deep thinker who after arriving at a philosophical conclusion spent considerable time come up with profound ways of expressing it. It’s sad that after so much effort, her writings were usually shuffled aside, or like this invocation, delivered to an audience, and then forgotten within minutes.

Her last statement, however, “to hold onto the very last shred,” is a thesis on her approach to life. When she broke her shoulder, late in life, she forged ahead, pushing through the pain and following through with her physical therapy plan until the shoulder healed and she returned to fully using both arms.

As her eyesight faded, with thick felt-tip pen in hand, she scribbled out her thoughts on large pads of paper. Much of what she wrote, in the last few years of her life, was impossible to read, her handwriting, reduced to jagged scrawls. But, she held on, determined to put her feelings on paper until her ship was no more.

Even though my grandparents had a long, peaceful marriage, dying within a year of each other, my grandmother at times, probably put on a “smiling face,” accepting with grace the station of her life, that of an adoring wife, mother, and skipper of the house. She bore the burdens of her husband’s seven eccentric sisters, and the melancholy of her three sisters, one who never married, another who tended to her handicapped son, the result of a suicide attempt gone wrong, and a third, contently married, but subdued by a well-meaning, but vivacious man whose personality, interests, and needs overpowered hers.

My grandmother’s brother, Ted Powell, was shuffled from household-to-household after her mother died, and her father, Solomon Powell, remarried the cousin of his first wife, Dora Sparks. Two more boys were born. The oldest, and undoubtedly smartest, Milton Powell, married young, had three children, and out of necessity, settled into a blue-collar job at a shipyard.

The youngest, Arthur L. Powell, went off to college (the only one in the family), found his fortune as a real estate developer (Kravco) and ended up developing the King of Prussia Mall, the largest shopping mall on the east coast, now part of the Simon Property Group. No one on the east coast was aware of Arthur’s success until recently when he wrote an autobiography of his life.

Of the seven children bore by Solomon Powell, only one truly plotted a course, set sail, steered the tiller, and became not only the captain of his soul, but a captain of industry. The rest, their lives caught up in circumstances, accepted what they couldn’t change… and like my grandmother wrote below, denied themselves, sometimes the simple pleasures in life.

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The first time Grandpa and I broke away from the kids and went to the movies by ourselves, we saw “You Can’t Take it With You.” I enjoyed it so much that it wasn’t until both children had seen the picture for themselves that I could stop regretting we had not taken them along.

And Grandpa and I never went alone to the movies until the kids had divorced themselves from us for “dates.” Silly, wasn’t it?

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The hen who cackles the loudest doesn’t necessarily lay the most eggs, but the rooster sure is going to know she’s around.