Nov. 26, 2009
By Louis Roney
Seated with friends at a bounteous table, we hold hands with those on either side of us and join in the blessing being said.
I find my thoughts concentrating on things far and near for which my whole being is thankful — things without which my life would be infinitely poorer, perhaps unbearable.
I realize that I am most thankful for being a lucky person.
Amid voluble table-talk, my reminiscences are drawn to oft-forgotten things that make all such occasions Thanksgivings of a sort.
I give thanks again that I did not perish, as did many of my young friends and Navy comrades-in-arms, during the four-year slaughter that was World War II.
I am thankful for being born with a competitive nature that thrives in the high-risk climate that duty, profession, and inclination have ordained to me.
Nothing has brought me exultation without the possibility of just the opposite's occurring.
I've lost many a skirmish, but never the zest to return to the fray with a will to win.
That great pragmatist, Vince Lombardi, taught me to pluck out the worm in the core of the human apple, i.e., the will to lose.
Johnny Mercer's lyrics suggest succinctly, "Eliminate the negative."
As the willing disciple of get-up-and-goers, I have never let myself conceive of myself as anything but a winner.
Hence, I have a conscious excitement when getting up in the morning. I'm thankful for that fact.
I am indebted to my genes and to temperate living for a strong physical constitution.
A cup of coffee is my one indulgence in the morning when my relatively low blood pressure is at its lowest.
I believe wholeheartedly in "Mens sana in corpore sano" — "A sound mind in a sound body."
I believe that negative thinking can make a body sick — that a maltreated, ill body can poison one's thinking.
This obvious symbiotic dependency of physical and mental well-being needs no temple, no theology.
I am thankful that my parents never let me be lazy — for very long, anyway!
As a result, I cannot today sit idle without thinking of something I should be doing.
Then, if I can do it, I do it.
And I feel an inner glow at having done it, rather than just sitting and thinking about doing it.
"Doing" is what it's all about. Doing nothing is the stuff of death.
I am thankful that I was brought up accepting responsibility for my own actions.
I am proud of some things I've done, and I happily take the credit for them.
I have made lots of errors — some that were lulus. So what else is new?
I try not to repeat my mistakes, so that I don't cross the line that separates an excusably imperfect human being from a damned jackass.
I've tried to learn to accept my own limitations, so that I can live at peace with myself.
I'm glad that I have never been able to gratify instantly any of the white-hot desires that have piqued me through the years.
In retrospect, nothing that I value highly ever came quickly or easily.
The dearest prizes have taken the longest to win, and have come in their own sweet time.
I am eternally thankful to the people who have helped me from my earliest years to achieve things that appeared out of reach.
My wise Georgia grandmother advised, "Try to make people like you. Make them want to help you. You'll never amount to much all by yourself."
When I suggested to her that there might be such a thing as a self-made man, she was ready for me: "Show me anyone who's successful, and who claims to have done it all by himself, and I'll show you either a conceited ass or a bald-faced liar."
I am thankful for a keenly attuned conscience that keeps my pride from getting me too far in debt to reality.
Conscience is the last line of defense of hard-won self-esteem.
I feel thankful that I have had some communicative skills, for better or worse.
Candidness obviates the reptilian processes of game-playing.
If "the truth shall set you free," game-playing shall fetter you in a tangled web of lies, and you shall stand for nothing.
I am grateful to people who let the chips fall where they may.
I have never been felled by a truthful chip.
But heavily timbered lies have knocked me for many a loop.
I am thankful to Harvard College for a scholarship that gave me four years that changed every aspect of my young existence.
How well I remember, after more than seven decades, such giants as Howard Mumford Jones, Robert Frost, William Yandell Elliott, Bertrand Russell, "Frisky" Merriman, Perry Miller, Harry Levin, and those other Dons who opened challenging doors for us and made us question everything we had ever accepted as dogma.
I am thankful for having been born with a good voice, and for having been graced as pupil and protege by great teacher Maestro Renato Bellini, the supreme tenor Jussi Bjoerling, and the dazzling Met soprano — and movie star — Grace Moore.
I am thankful that my life has taken me from Central Florida to so many historic places I had only read about, and that I have met so many people who were legends in their times: John Charles Thomas, Walter Damrosch, Bing Crosby, Amelita Galli-Curci, Rosa Ponselle, Ezio Pinza, Mary Martin, Charles de Gaulle, Grace Kelly, Douglas Southall Freeman, Wieland Wagner, Carlo Maria Giulini, Alfred North Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, Albert Schweitzer, Ernest Hemingway, Dimitri Mitropoulos, Konrad Adenauer, Leonard Warren, Fritz Wunderlich, Regine Crespin, Leonie Rysanek, Margaret Truman, Birgit Nilsson, and many, many others.
After 50 years of singing, I was thankful to become enthusiastically occupied as a teacher, who could pass on to another generation of talented young people those treasures of vocal technique that were given to him by many who are no longer on Earth.
"Bel canto," beautiful singing, describes the pragmatic technique that makes singing a high art. I am gratified to have embodied that long-honored tradition and do not presume to have added much of anything.
Above all, I am grateful for my smart, spirited, gifted, positive-thinking wife who sees mostly the good in me — but who pulls no punches when she thinks I'm out of line. She is my seeing-eye light in my Samson's-night.
You can't choose your siblings, but you can choose your mate.
That's a "relative" privilege worth considering.
Lastly, I am thankful for the Christian ethic, the embodiment of the Golden Rule that generates intrinsic and extrinsic peace.
The loveliest fruit of this way of thinking is called "good will to men."
Good will is the product of our crediting each other for even the smallest of human kindnesses — Thanks!
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