Let me guess. You are sitting in your kitchen with your morning cup of coffee, reading today’s paper. You are feeling slightly bloated from Thursday’s Thanksgiving feast and you are seriously considering joining one of the health clubs in town. On second thought, the holiday season wouldn’t be a good time to start. You’d better wait until after Christmas — New Year’s Resolution and all that. (See you then.)

Thursday you probably shared your reasons to be thankful with your friends and family as you sat down to dinner. Now matter how tough your year was, there’s always plenty to be thankful for. We do the same in our family. And every year, as I listen to others speak, I think back to Thanksgiving 1985, the year being thankful took on a whole new meaning for me.

This year, with the economic health of this country collapsing around us, with people losing their jobs, their homes; their savings — that memory comes back more clearly than ever.

I’d been out of the military for three years and was still trying to start a career as a freelance writer here in Corvallis. We were scraping by. My wife Debbie was working as a church secretary, a job she liked with people she loved. But between the two of us, we were making way less than one-half my previous salary in the Marine Corps.

In those days every trip to the mail box was fraught with hopes and fear. Is this an acceptance or another rejection? Will the magazine’s check arrive today? I need it to make the rent. How long can I put off paying the hospital for Corky’s last visit to the Emergency Room? I don’t need a lot of money, just some I can count on every month. If I only had regular magazine assignments, I could buy health insurance. Every day without insurance seems like walking on a tightrope. If somebody gets seriously hurt or sick, I may never get out of debt.

Every month was a terrible struggle. Successfully living paycheck to paycheck seemed too much to hope for. Only on the real good months were we able to get by without pulling money from a small and rapidly dwindling savings account. Then our landlord announced his intention to sell the house, and we had no place to go.

That was my first experience with total helplessness, the soul-wrenching sense that I was incapable of taking care of my family. Now there’s a feeling that will tear your guts out. For the first time in my life I could understand the men who’d been broken by the Great Depression. Suddenly I could sympathize with down-on-their-luck people I’d never previously understood.

We’d dreamed of buying the house, but there was no way we could qualify for a loan large enough, so we started looking at smaller places elsewhere. There were lots of houses on the market in 1985; the country was in the midst of a recession. But my pitifully small, hopelessly irregular income was a real problem.

We were in a race against time. Our landlord had found a buyer, and we needed to be out by the end of November. Finally we found a possibility, but the bank was putting us through the wringer. “How can we anticipate how much you will make in the future?” After a protracted negotiation that ended with an 11.5 percent, 30-year mortgage, we were awarded the loan and the house. My sigh of relief was audible in Omaha. Try to imagine being excited about an interest rate near 12 percent.

We took possession of the house in late November, and on that Thanksgiving Day, in the midst of a rare early season snowstorm, I spent hour after hour slogging through deep snow, carrying boxes of household goods from the garage to our house. I even dared to dream of the day I’d be able to afford health care.

I think of that day often, especially on Thanksgiving. And no one is ever more thankful.

Pat Wray is a freelance writer and longtime local resident. He can be reached at patwray@comcast.net.