Thanks.

No, this is not going to be a "thank goodness nothing new started hurting overnight" post.

But I am thinking about what it is we feel thankful for. I cannot list everything, or you would spend the entire day reading my various thankful blog posts, instead of watching football as you should.

Right now I just want to say "Thanks!" to the Yale hospital folks who figured out what was going on in my uncle's heart and got it patched up. It really is remarkable, when you think about it, that doctors can send one of those tiny cameras up an artery from somewhere near where your leg joins your body, and look around inside your heart. THEY CAN LOOK AROUND INSIDE YOUR HEART, WITH A LITTLE CAMERA. Then they can take a little tube, put it inside the part of your heart that is not staying in the position that it should, then send the world's tiniest balloon in pump the tube up to where it should be. Are you pausing with me for reflection?

One of the real highlights of this fall was the phone conversation I had with my uncle, the night after he had this procedure done, a full day after he had gone to the hospital because his pulse would not come down. I can so easily go back to the moment of that conversation, sitting by the little gas fireplace in my study, wanting to physically feel the warmth that I both needed and received from hearing that he was going to be OK. It was one of those magical times when you believe and really do feel that a telephone can make a connection with someone 833 miles away.

So I am thankful for that voice-carrying technology, and for the new technology inside his heart ("a stent in my heart to match the bolt in my wrist," he said). And I am thankful for my uncle, and for the chance to have more conversations like that one.