A couple of days before Thanksgiving when I was 11 years old, the house my family lived in was gutted by a fire. We had been stripping the white paint off the 150-year-old oak woodwork as a restoration project. It was snowing and windy out, so the workers had closed the windows. A spark from plugging in a work lamp lit the turpentine fumes, and a fireball tore through the house. Firefighters arrived in minutes and saved most of the load-bearing structure. But everything inside was melted, charred, soaked, ruined. It was a year before we could live in it again, and a few more years before you couldn't tell there had been a fire there.

To this day, I remember this on Thanksgiving -- because of what happened next. Before that day was out, neighbors had offered all of us places to sleep. The owner of a small independent department store downtown must have heard about the fire on the local evening news. He unlocked the doors of his closed store after hours and told us to go in and take whatever we needed. I remember being awed because it was a fancy store we never would have shopped in, and he didn't even know us.  

Then so many friends showed up, weekend after weekend for months, to help us haul the charred stuff out of the house into a dumpster in the front yard and start rebuilding. Once, a neighbor must have realized we'd all been at this for hours without eating, and made us lunch. It's strange what kids remember, but I was especially moved that they weren't even worried about us getting their house dirty. They had an extremely elegant house with a snow-white carpet, but they laid newspaper down on the rug and invited the whole lot of us, black as coal miners from head to toe, to come in and have homemade soup and bread. There are more stories that I won't tell here.

Most of the time I lament how horrible humans can be to each other. I'm glad to be reminded every year that humans can also be amazingly generous and kind. When I had kids, I started a tradition of baking a pie and bringing it to the local fire station for the firefighters on duty on Thanksgiving day. This gave me a way to express gratitude, and also to share that story with my kids. My kids are grown now, but they are visiting me today, and we just dropped off the pie they baked.

Happy Thanksgiving.