The Bell Curve:

I sat at my computer all morning starting and discarding the beginnings of an 800-word essay that will be read — if at all — on Thanksgiving Day.

I’ve tried clever, and the tone was wrong. Art Buchwald, dead or alive, owns it without challenge. So I shifted to reverence and got hung up on who it is we are thanking and how that squares with the 1st Amendment. Besides, City Councilwoman Wendy Leece has already filed an exclusive claim on that territory

That took me to a laundry list of blessings which, indeed, I could come up with because this has been a banner year of fresh blessings for me, and I want to thank everyone responsible for that. Still, the bulk of blessings tend to carry over from year to year, and when you spend nine years at the same column you have to take a tough line in weeding out repetitions.

Or do you? Do blessings have to be new to be counted?

That’s the quandary I was in when the mail arrived today, always a blessing at such a time because it offers a diversion I can flee to. On this day, the star attraction in the mail was a book. And it carried a message to me that wasn’t in the text — designed for young people — but in the identity of the author.

For all the decades since we came home from the same war, Clifford Hicks — as a journalist and magazine editor, but mostly as a close and enduring friend — has been an integral part of my life. And for more decades than I can recall, one of the fixtures of that friendship has been spending my July 4 birthday at his home in the hill country of North Carolina. That’s where I was on my last birthday. But it almost didn’t happen. And for the first time, there was a creeping sense that it might not happen again.

But that was before I encountered The Book. In the months between last Christmas and my birthday, Cliff seemed to spend almost as much time in hospitals as he did at home. He suffered a heart attack and a stroke and a variety of urology problems that once required a helicopter ride to a distant hospital, and, at one critical juncture, brought his three sons from Iowa and Illinois to his bedside, where their mother had been stationed firmly throughout these travails.