With another Thanksgiving Day holiday staring us in the face, I suppose the first thing a guy ought to be thankful for is that he is not one of those well-bred and well-fed turkeys raised on Bob Neal’s farm, as described in an Associated Press feature story earlier this week.

Neal is a former ink-stained wretch who once labored part-time on this newspaper’s copy desk while teaching in the University of Maine’s Journalism Department following employment at newspapers in Kansas City, Montreal and Winnipeg. After working for so long with the human turkeys of the news biz he figured that he had all the credentials necessary to work full-time with the real thing. So he bought a 60-acre spread over in New Sharon, dubbed it “The Turkey Farm,” and the rest is history.

With Neal’s 2,200 premium free-range broad-breasted white turkeys about to go on the chopping block in preparation for next Thursday’s feasting – and with demand exceeding supply – it sounds like he made the right career move.

“I’m going to charge you at least three times what the Shop ‘n Save charges you, and I’m going to sell out and they’re not,” Neal told AP reporter Jerry Harkavy, exuding a confidence perhaps born equally from experience in the turkey business and the heady good old days of wielding absolute power as a take-no-prisoners copy editor.

If you had to be a turkey in this countdown to Thanksgiving you’d probably want to be the one whose life is traditionally spared by decree of the President of the United States of America playing to the animal rights crowd. The annual photo op rivals the February groundhog-and-his-shadow thing for sheer silliness, but seems to be a popular diversion from weightier leadership pursuits, and so it lives on.

In this season for giving thanks, I’m certainly grateful for the big stuff. Like the presidentially pardoned turkey, I’m pretty happy that my neck is not now, nor does it figure to soon be, squarely in the village guillotine with executioner at the ready. But mostly I’m thankful for the little things:

. That there are gifted writers who can crank out lines that linger in the memory long after their book has been read and returned to the library shelf. Passages such as one by the late novelist John Gardner in his book “October Light,” describing an erudite matron whose eclectic reading tastes included Chaucer and Shakespeare, “… although she would have to think twice, she often said, before choosing between Milton and the gas chamber.”

. That two disgruntled tourists from away, who, needing to answer a call of nature wicked bad this past summer, allegedly had to scrunch up their toes and cross their legs all the way from Washington County to more civilized confines the other side of Kittery before they could find a suitably proper spot to obtain blessed relief. I’m thankful that they felt compelled to write a letter to the editor about their experience, promising never to return to Maine because of the indignity. And downright pleased as punch that their letter published in this newspaper provoked a flood of good old down-home Yankee readers to leave creative suggestions in my e-mailbox for other tourists finding themselves in a similar bind, and no four-star Martha Stewart-recommended pit stop within 200 miles.

. That, as a grizzled veteran of the Interstate 95 driving wars, I can appreciate a recent e-mail posting reminding me that just because I’m trapped in the passing lane and have no chance to speed up or move back into the driving lane doesn’t mean that the kamikaze Massachusetts driver attached to my rear bumper at 70 mph doesn’t believe he can go faster in my spot.

. That some out-of-touch major league baseball team owners, having done their best to ruin baseball by signing so-called superstar ballplayers to ludicrous gazillion-dollar long-term contracts ($250 million for 10 years in the case of Texas Rangers shortstop Alex Rodriguez; how numb is that?), are now stuck with the consequences of their folly. Trying to unload their grossly overpaid jocks on some owner who is even dumber than they are, they have found no takers. The sheer serves-them-right joy that this brings to the average sports fan is so indescribable in the English language that we must turn to the Germans for help. “Schadenfreude,” which is a combination of the words “damage” and “joy,” is their unique word for the delight we take when the stupidity of others comes back to bite them.

To my list of little things for which to be thankful come Thursday, add Teutonic efficiency.

NEWS columnist Kent Ward lives in Winterport. His e-mail address is olddawg@bangordailynews.net.