In 1999 I was living in Calcutta, India working for Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity.  By day I cleaned bed sores and pulled maggots out of open wounds.  I carried skeletal women in my arms and bathed them with my hands. I held the women who came to be my friends and washed their smocks. I wrapped my arms around Paloo and sang John Denver songs to her.  She smiled though her eyes couldn’t see and her body was riddled with scabies.

At night I took the bus home and walked past the Untouchables building fires against a polluted dusk.  The children pulled on my hem.  Every day.  For months.

I lived with a Muslim family and I never saw the wife leave the house, though I knew that she did because there was always food from the market, which they insisted on sharing with me.  The man who owned the small house was in a feud with his brother, who had bribed someone to cut off the water supply to the house we lived in.  It was par for the course in Calcutta.  Expect the unexpected.

Every day, our water was delivered by a man with dark skin and matted hair.  He came in bare feet with the water on his back in a kind of gigantic bladder and emptied our daily supply into an old oil barrel.  One blue plastic bucket’s worth of this water was included in my daily rent.

I perfected the bucket shower – a careful act of preservation and purpose.  Every drop was important.

During December, when the temperatures dropped, I contracted a cold and my landlord graciously offered to heat my water until I recovered.  Those warm-water buckets were a godsend.

I took them at 6 in the morning, before I walked the mile to the Mother House for the morning service.  I was not Catholic, not even religious per se, but the calm and quiet of the Mother House grounded me before I headed to Kalighat to fill my nostrils with death and light.

Every day since I returned from Calcutta, when I turn the faucet on and a hot rush of water hits my body, I am overwhelmed by a feeling of expanding gratitude.

The simple luxury of running water.  The simple luxury of a water heater.  Of all the lessons that I learned in India, this one has stuck with me the most poignantly.  Every single day I am overwhelmed by my privilege, my wealth, my whiteness. All I have to do is step into the shower.  That’s all it takes.

These days, before I go to bed, I write in a book and list every bit of gratitude that I can squeeze out.  Names, events, moments, whatever.

Cheesy?  Maybe.  But effective.

I sleep with a glad heart.

I wake up with humility and perspective.

Maybe it’s ironic that our American Thanksgiving Holiday celebrates a dubious historical moment.  Maybe it’s ironic that we eat to the point of sickness.

Either way, I grabbed my niece and nephew into my arms, ate a piece of pie, and told old family stories until Sal looked as if his eyes might bleed. We laughed and lifted glasses.

Later, I pulled the covers over me and took out my book.  I listed the names of my family.  I wrote down pumpkin pie.  I wrote “health” and “house” and “heat”.  I wrote “Sally”.

I wrote “gratitude everyday”.

And I closed my eyes and dreamed of Paloo and John Denver.

*

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