It’s hard to understand why I feel hopeful today.

I remain unemployed.  My budget for job-free living has dissipated.  I cancelled my appointment for a physical therapy eval at Stanford for various passably coherent reasons but remain concerned about the extra wobble in my walk.  My march towards old age continues with no fountain of youth in sight.

Yet I found myself awake before dawn making lists not of my failures but of my blessings.

Yesterday’s mail brought a heart-wrenching thank-you card from my sister Joyce.

My dear friend Pat and her little Yorkie traveled from Arizona to visit me.  We’ve been tooling around the Delta with a background soundtrack of her sassy attitude toward life, the deliciousness of which I had forgotten.

A gentle breeze drifts through the open window even now.  What passes for heat here on the river would seem like sweet spring in the Midwest.

Knock wood, but I seem to be sleeping soundly with a new mattress and pillow.  When you suffer from neurological sleep disruptions, the refreshment of continual unconsciousness cannot be underplayed.

My son called with an intriguing report about a town hall meeting addressing oversight of the Chicago police which he attended. His social activism gratifies me and gives some slight inkling f redemption for the nation.  His generation might just save us; or at least, slow our ruination.

My blessings might seem trivial to most people.  But they delight me.  I’ll take them, each and every last one.  And others, just as small.  I don’t need the pot of gold; I’ll take the rainbow.

It’s the seventh day of the fifty-fourth month of My Year Without Complaining.  Life continues.