Many reasons to give Thanksgiving thanks

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Remember to stuff yourself at least as full of thanks this Thanksgiving as you will of turkey, pie and football. Here are a few things for which thoughts of thanks stuff my heart;

. For maple syrup and those who make it. Put it on french toast with real butter and it makes a heavenly pile so good you just about want to roll around in it;

. For Julie Andrews, one of my first heart throbs. She has made a female British accent forever sexy to my ears;

. “The Sound of Music,” its wonderful songs and its resurgent popularity among kids one-third my age. Must be Julie Andrews;

. The sound of Taps at a funeral, because when it stops we are reminded by the crystalline silence at the end of the last note of the void left

by the death of someone that someone else loved so much;

. That if we are lucky Taps will need to be played less frequently this coming year for American soldiers killed in Iraq;

. That we have the ability to notice the small, wonderful pleasures surrounding us amidst the chaos and the hubbub, if we just look and listen for them. They include single acts of human kindness amidst the oppressive misery of war, the gleeful squeal of a small child in a store full of people, a bright flower growing out from the rocks, the sound of an infant experimenting with her newly discovered voice, and “snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes”;

. That first sip of hot coffee on a cold morning, the one you can feel from your chest right up through to the tips of your ears;

. That cool feeling you get in the pit of your belly when the swing heads back down from its apex, or you goose the car a little too fast over the crest of a rise in the road (not that I would

ever do that). When I get that feeling

I remember being six years old;

. The city leaf sucker that comes each fall for my raked piles of leaves by the side of the road. If it did not take the leaves away I would probably bag them up in red sacks and send them out as Christmas presents to relatives down south. The LL Bean “Our Own Bag o’ Maine Leaves” – yeah, that’s it!

. That some day the city might let me drive that leaf sucker, because it is a serious boy toy. If they do, just

make sure to keep your kids, pets and VW Bugs off the street;

. The perfect chocolate chip cookie. I have eaten many great ones but still hunt for the perfect one. Send me your recipes and I will continue the hunt – in the interests of medical science, of course, since few things come as close to being good for what ails you as warm chocolate cookies and a glass of milk (whole, of course);

. That good friends will tell me when my fly is down, and that when

I am too full of myself one of them holds up the mirror long enough

for me to smarten up;

. For good nurses and pharmacists and the others who look over my doctor’s shoulders and help keep me from screwing up;

. That Brooke Shields had the guts to stand up to Tom Cruise and tell him that what he knows about post-partum depression could be blown out of his nose;

. That the White House is not a submarine, because the place was so full of leaks about the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame it would sink during a cruise around the White House bird bath;

. For Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, Maine’s two senators, who have more gonads than God gave horses and sometimes seem to be all that stand between America’s poor and the budgetary Hurricane Katrina of the right wing of the Republican Party

in Washington;

. For the American doctors, nurses, and medics on duty in Iraq, where they stand between wounded soldiers and the abyss, fighting for every life, giving the best chances of survival ever offered to injured Americans

in the history of war;

. For Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings Opus 11.” If you never have, listen to it in eight minutes of quiet and let this adagio transport and transform you. It could bring tears

to the eyes of a Maine potato;

. That one of my patients recently told me I needed a new picture at the top of my Bangor Daily News because I look younger in real life than I do in that picture;

. For the Bangor Daily News, and the continued privilege of writing this column;

. For friends with cable TV, which I don’t have, so that when the Patriots are playing on Fox I can pretend I am coming over to get a cup of maple syrup and stay for the whole game;

. That feeling I get when my children call and I can tell they are doing well just by the tone of their voices saying, “Hi, Dad”;

. That feeling I get when my wife reaches out for my hand in a crowd;

. For great photographs, and their ability to freeze our attention on the reality of another human being’s needs long enough to remember we must feel the pain of those less fortunate if we are really to feel human ourselves. (For a review of the year in great pictures go to MSNBC.com. and click on The Week in Pictures.)

Use the images of people in need of love, peace, security, food, medicine, shelter and the plain milk of human kindness to remind you to give charitably to others, and to give thanks for what you have this Thanksgiving Day.

Erik Steele, D.O., a physician in Bangor, is chief medical officer of Eastern Maine Healthcare Systems and is on the staff of several hospital emergency rooms in the region.