Giving Thanks to... Josh

I haven’t quite established the rules for this month of thanks giving, so I’m a little unsure who to thank. I’m hoping that once the “who” is identified the question of “how” will work itself out, because so far, it all feels a little awkward. My one rule of thanking someone every day hasn’t exactly been followed, which oddly makes it even harder to write a thank you.

Part of the problem is that I don’t want to get too personal. A lot of days the people who I have the most reason to thank are friends or coworkers who I don’t feel comfortable writing about on the internet. Plus, “Hey thanks for helping me out back there; I really owe you one” isn’t always thank-you-note worthy and would just create an odd working relationship. I would become the weird guy who writes thank you notes, which is fine among family and friends, but colleagues is a different story.

I had visions of writing thank yous to famous people, but at what point does a thank you just become basic fan mail, and I feel like I’m too old for fan mail. “Hey thanks for making that really cool movie.” It would be neat to collect folks autographs though. Somebody in my family tree did that several generations back and amassed the signatures of lots of people who I mostly don’t know but included Sam Houston and President Zachary Taylor. I think it was Taylor . Anyways, that’s a different task all together though, and didn’t require any thanks.

I had a friend growing up who became an eagle scout and he invited all these famous people to his eagle scout ceremony. I remember him getting an autographed picture from Charlton Heston and thinking “Hey, it’s Ben Hur!”

Maybe I should be thanking people like my old friends who I’ve lost touch with over the years and just say, “It sucks we’ve grown apart. Thanks for all the great memories.” Sure it would sound a bit like a yearbook entry, but this time I’d mean it.

All that being said, I may have to search for an address on this one, but:

Dear Josh,

Hey man, it’s John Duffy! I got to thinking about you today and felt compelled to write to see how you are doing. I don’t think we’ve seen each other for some ten or so years, pretty crazy eh? It sucks that we grew apart. I know we had some great laughs back in the day and, in the spirit of Thanksgiving, I just wanted to say thanks for all the good times growing up.

...

Anyways, I hope you and your family are doing well,

John Duffy

The actual letter included more, but you get the basic idea.