Louis Roney: Thanks!

My life has been one long repetitious Thanksgiving. All of us have choices to make and autobiographies to write. Let us never forget that the responsibility to thank is ever present. We hope to look back with pride on what we have done — so let’s do things of which we can be proud and remember to express thanks to those who have helped us along the way.

Once again I give thanks that I did not perish in the Navy during World War II. I am proud to be an American! I enjoy a conscious excitement when getting up in the morning. I’m thankful for that fact.

At 91, 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 apparatus. If the body is the temple of the soul, let’s keep the temple clean and in good repair.

“Doing” is what life is 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 that 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. A truthful chip has never felled me. 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 the simple fact of having been born with a good voice, and for sine qua non training as pupil and protégé of great teacher Maestro Renato Bellini, the supreme tenor Jussi Björling, and the dazzling Met soprano — and movie star — Grace Moore. I am thankful that life has taken me far from Central Florida to so many cosmopolitan places I had only read about.

After 50 years of singing, I was thankful to become enthusiastically occupied as a teacher, able to 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 anything of my own invention. 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 and your friends! That’s a “relative” privilege to be grateful for. Lastly, I am thankful for the Christian ethic, the embodiment of the Golden Rule, which generates intrinsic and extrinsic peace.

The loveliest fruit of this way of thinking is called “goodwill to men.”

Goodwill is the appreciation we extend to each other for all the help we have received in becoming what we are. For even the smallest of human kindnesses in our lives, let us not ever forget to say —

“Thanks!”