In years past, I haven’t been very grateful on Thanksgiving.

Like millions of teenagers in the United States, I was grateful to have a day off of school to eat and watch bad football games.  I slopped homemade cranberry sauce on white meat and lifted my fork in the air to toast the pilgrims’ pillaging of natives.  I didn’t realize that I was grateful for all the wrong reasons.

This year, things are different.

I realized what I should actually be turkey toasting a few months ago when I met a guy I used to work with who came here from Guatemala.  For a number of reasons, I don’t want to use his name, so let’s call him Juan.

Juan fled his native country in 1998 in search of better opportunities to support his family.  The short, powerful man left behind his 6- and 18-month-old children in their shack of a home so he could earn money so they could have food on the table every day.

Once he got to America, Juan used the countless hours he spent back home killing time breathing life into dying junkers to land jobs as an auto repairman.  He sent some money home and he thought things were going to be all right.

That’s until he found out his wife cheated on him in 2000.

Juan spiraled in and out of depression and alcoholism as he tried to justify why she’d have sex with another man when he was juggling a handful of jobs for 20 hours a day to keep her sheltered.  Although alienated, he still sent her his earnings because he loved his family and knew they needed help.  Soon things got worse for Juan. 

When he’d earn a lot of money, he’d throw it all into his deathly gambling addiction.  He would win a few hands and ride his streak, coming out a richer man.  But Juan wouldn’t stop there.  He was thirsty for money, trying to collect as much as possible with hopes that it would make everything better back home.

The aging man lost himself along the way, though.  He would take his money, “see some girls,” and blow the rest off on scratch-off lottery tickets.  He lost it all and had to work his way back up from the ground.  And he did.

He cured his gambling addiction a few years back but couldn’t halt the alcoholism, slamming back cases of beers whenever he got the chance to drink.  But Juan still worked, and he still sent money home.

Soon enough, problems arose again.

A few years ago, Juan’s son called him and asked him for a favor.

“Hey Dad, can you send me a gun?”

“What for?  Do you have any problems?”

“No, I just want it for safety.”

You can see the hurt in the fatigued man’s eyes and wrinkled forehead, and you can hear it in his beaten, broken voice when he tells you about that conversation.  He can’t stand that his son wants protection and won’t open up to him about it.  Juan itched to go home.  So when I met him a few months ago, he told me he’d go back home to his children in a year because he missed them too much.

That is, after he got a few things straightened out.

Juan’s legal problems began about a year ago, when a hulking, white giant towered over him in a bar and smashed him on the head for standing up for his friend.  Juan tried to fight back, but it was to no use.  He can still feel the sharp indent in his jagged-edged skull today.

When Juan found out that his lawyer couldn’t do anything for him in court two months ago, he was frustrated.  But then he put his life into perspective.

“Sometimes I complain about my luck,” he would tell me.  “Sometimes I say, ‘Why me, God?’  Sometimes I complain about why things happen to me.  But I’m lucky I’m still alive.  I didn’t die when I was in the bar.  God saved my life.”

That’s what Juan will be saluting in six days.  His life and his kids.

I try to appreciate Juan’s life and how he can carry on through hardship while we fret over box scores and Black Friday sales.  I realized that even though we have more than him, and that we can score higher on standardized tests than him, he’s still centuries wiser than us.

He knows that things mean more than white meat and agternoon football games.