It’s Veteran’s Day, November 11, 2020. My heart runs full of honor, admiration, and gratitude for those who serve and protect, and for their sacrifices, and those of their families.

An odd assortment of reflections have occupied my thoughts this day. I wonder if I can loop a couple together with a “veterans” theme.

First, I’m thinking of my grandson who is a new US Marine, since last January. With less than a year of service behind him, veteran may not yet apply to Justen’s status. (A quick definition of veteran is: “a person who has had long experience in a particular field.”)

But he has surely undergone great personal transformation in stepping into these new boots. He is now part of an organization intensely dedicated to serving and protecting.

The molding of Justen into a US Marine has also been a family-changing affair for his parents and siblings. In the words of my daughter Natalie, Justen’s mom, “Yeah, we were enlisted automatically with him.”

Second musing: Most of this year 2020 has–like it or not–stretched us and tipped us in unsuspected ways. Eight or nine months is not usually considered a great length of time. But these last ones have certainly had their impact, throwing us into untested waters and ways.

Accustomed to our previous social conditions, who among us has not felt the strain? Mandates and masks, social distances, altered experiences in shopping, traveling, worshiping, the spike in social unrest. The contrast between “the norm” of 2019 and that of 2020 is shocking and sobering.

We may feel more like victims of change than veterans. But I’m finding that much may be learned from contrast.

In fact, a sharpened sense of gratitude for, shall we say, mundane things has happened to me. For instance, I was recently astonished at the delight I felt when I braked for a crossing guard helping school children cross the street. Same feeling for watching a couple holding hands as they strolled a socially-distanced sidewalk.

And faces! It’s a delight to see a face. How miraculous that we all have faces to appreciate!

If I can develop into a veteran of gratitude, it will be a blessing of troubled times.

Third of my ponderings:

My 2019 ambition to produce a regular blog got sidelined by the onslaught of 2020’s upheavals. I had seven published blogs under my belt before the weirdness arose.

It’s quirky that my last blog was written on New Year’s Eve of 2019, in praise of my anticipations for the new year.

2020. I was ready for big changes. I thought.

January began with a new occupation that needed me to acquire sharper technological skills to succeed. I was hard at it and making slow progress when, in mid-March, Coronavirus changed the landscape. Eleven weeks into my new career, I was done: “reduction of workforce due to Covid 19.”

But it was my good fortune to find my old work as a mail carrier still available to me. When so many people were sheltering at home, barred from their regular workplaces, I found myself as busy as ever, driving miles and miles every day, and seldom at home. I even acquired an unforeseen label: “Essential Worker.”

Thus, I observed, in October, my seven year anniversary as a contracted mail carrier in Park City, Utah. I’m back at the relentless, weathery, six-days-a-week physical labor I was trying to leave behind.

I’m surprised at how content I feel about that!

I experienced nearly three months away from my mail route, and it gave me a new perspective. I realized there were things about it that I missed.

I’m pleased now to again be self-directed in my daily work, to be physically active, to have lots of driving time to think and to listen to Classical 89 on the radio. It’s good to be serving the community in a worthwhile pursuit that demands my focus and effort.

I’m a Mail Carrier Veteran of seven years. I’m grateful.

And I blogged again! Back burner . . . take that!

This I recall to my mind, therefore have I hope. It is of the Lord’s mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness. The Lord is my portion, saith my soul; therefore will I hope in him. The Lord is good unto them that wait for him, to the soul that seeketh him.

Lamentations 3:21-25 (NIV)