Today is mj’s first birthday. One year ago I started it all with this post.

mj’s come a long way in the last year. I started out with no real plans, just a general idea of posting whatever is on my mind. But over time I started concentrating my writing until I’ve now got it focused like a laser beam on the specific goal of posting whatever is on my mind.

Sometimes during the year, I have wondered if the time spent blogging could be better spent on other, more useful tasks. It is during those times of doubt that I think back to what my mother said to me so long ago…

I was a freshman in college, and I was home at Thanksgiving break. It was a very difficult first year for me. My roommate, Doug, was a drug abuser, and there were always strange goings on in our room. Our room was party central for the worst kind of people. I remember once in the middle of the night, someone woke me up with his banging on the door. My roommate wasn’t there at the time, so I got up and answered the door. There was someone in a ski mask asking for Doug. It was then that I realized that he wasn’t just doing drugs, but he was also involved in selling them as well.

The night before I left for Thanksgiving break, I came back to my room after studying late into the evening. There was someone passed out drunk in my bed. To get into my own bed, I had to work to wake up this drunk, and as he rolled out of my bed, he threw up.

That was the kind of situation I was living in at the time, and I felt sick about the thought of returning to it after Thanksgiving. I was thinking, maybe it would be better to just stay at home and not return to that drug infested cesspool.

But as I was struggling through those thoughts and emotions, at the Thanksgiving meal my mother greatly encouraged me and gave me the inner strength to not only return to finish my freshman year, but to complete college. And it is her words coming down to me from so long ago that have kept me blogging through this year.

She looked me right in the eye from across the table and (I can almost hear her even now) she said, “Knilram, could you please pass the gravy.”

Happy Thanksgiving. And please pass the gravy.