Play On!

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 without which my life would be infinitely poorer, perhaps unbearable.

I realize that I am most thankful for being a lucky person. Once again, I give thanks that I did not perish in the Navy during World War II.

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. 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, and that a maltreated, ill body can poison one’s thinking. If the body is the temple of the soul, let’s keep the temple clean and in good repair.

“Doing” is what life’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 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.

In retrospect, nothing which I value highly ever came quickly or easily.

I am thankful for a keenly attuned conscience that keeps my pride from getting me too far in debt to reality.

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 the scholarship that gave me four years that changed every aspect of my young existence.

I am thankful for having been born with a good voice, and for having been graced as pupil and protégé 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 cosmopolitan milieus I had only read about.

After 50 years of singing, I was thankful to become enthusiastically occupied as a teacher, who could pass on to talented young people those treasures of vocal art that were given to me by many who are no longer on Earth. I am gratified to have embodied the long-honored artistic tradition of bel canto singing 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 am 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 to be grateful for.

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!