It made me think about all I have to be grateful for, similar to probably some of the things you're grateful for too: grateful for my wife, for my first wife and our children, for my caring partners, my parents, for my caring, health care chaplain sister, for grandparents, aunts and uncles and the Dominican nuns I had throughout my first twelve years of school, the many good priests I've known, including those who were my next door neighbors when I was growing up, and at Gloucester Catholic High School in New Jersey.

I'm grateful for the very dear friends I've had, some of whom have sadly gone ahead. For all of them, I like to think of the line that says that, "You're never really dead as long as someone is alive who still remembers you." Whatever I've become, I surely stand on the shoulders of all these good people, especially a number of my friends of sixty years who have always been there for me.

Winston Churchill said that, "All of a man's fortune is wrapped up in seemingly insignificant events." It's only in retrospect that we can see how what seemed to be next to nothing at the time has really made a lot of difference down the road. What have turning points like that been for you? What are you grateful for?

For me, high school is an always fondly remembered part of my life. As my now octogenarian friend and funeral director told me when he was in his twenties and I was getting ready to go into high school, "Lar, high school is the best four years of your life." It was a superior four years and virtually all the close friends I have today, are wonderful friends that I still have the good fortune to see several times a year.

I'm grateful for my high school English teacher and an English professor at Seton Hall, who both helped me write better. I never dreamed that I would have written well over a million words by now, all typed with two fingers. (Yes, I should have taken typing in high school, but didn't. One of many omissions I wish I hadn't made.)

I'm grateful to my real estate teachers, who unknowingly prepared me to later teach over 5000 real estate students in my state approved real estate school. I'm grateful I was able to teach the students I had and to help some of them build a career and earn income for their families.

I had a gravitation toward college teaching and was an adjunct instructor at five different colleges. That eventually led me to full time teaching at Atlantic Community College. In an unexpected turn of events, an advertising instructor at Atlantic sadly passed away and they needed someone in short order who could teach advertising. I could teach real estate too, so that helped me to get the position. Then an opportunity was available at Stockton State College. Not only was I able to teach business administration subjects there, but they had a General Studies Program where each faculty member had to offer a course outside her/his field. Having been a student of the American Presidency, I taught a course in the American Presidency there for nine semesters. A unique opportunity I was grateful for.

Dr. Sacks expressed a thought about himself that I've had too: "I am sorry to have wasted - and still waste- so much time...I am sorry that I speak no other languages but my mother tongue (with my love of France, I dearly wish I had learned French instead of  Latin and German, but then again, who knew?), and that I have not traveled or experienced other cultures as widely as I should have done. I'm truly grateful for the traveling I've done, especially to France and Canada. My father was right: "Traveling is the best education."

I feel I should be trying to complete my life, whatever 'completing a life' means. How do you intend to complete yours? In the meantime, I'm going to try to be grateful for it all and to try focusing on the doughnut and not the hole!