Matthew Henry John Bartlett

Of course there are more reasons than I can say or know, but the first one that comes to mind is that I have someone to be thankful to for e.g. mandarins, books, all flowers everywhere, girls in buses, cycling, freecycling, Leonard Cohen, the cabbage trees and soggy flats around Lake Wairarapa, the sun spilling down the Hutt valley into the harbour, the front-marking cloud to the west that looks as solid as a mountain range, the gaps between languages, having been launched into the world with loads of food within arm’s reach and some good work to do, and having more people than I can count who I love and who seem to be reasonably fond of me. For many of those things there is someone to whom I can be more immediately thankful, like the mandarin tree or my parents or the universe, but it seems wonderful to me that there is some one person ‘behind’ all those, who is presumably not less than all of them, and who might be pleased that someone is grateful.