The best thing to do the day before the Holy Bowl football game is to write a gratitude list of ten good things, and then as you are feeling grateful and glad add five or ten or a hundred things that you wish would happen.

I am so happy and grateful that. . . .

•  I have a great job.
•  My students are awesome.
• I have readers now.
• The quality of light this morning as I drove lost and strange through South Sacramento in a misbegotten attempt to go to my great job was smoky and pink and moony.
• I’m sitting in bed eating eucalyptus cough drops trying to breathe through my poor sinuses as I write this, while at the foot of the bed my college-aged daughter who is leaving tomorrow and her friend look through their old yearbook with my youngest daughter and they are laughing.
• A student burst into the classroom today during a serious moment and cried, “Why is there a chihuahua in the hallway?”
• It’s Friday and I can’t breathe but tomorrow is Holy Bowl and in the room in my heart that I’ve always had for sons resides young men for whom football is a hero’s journey and Hughes Stadium is a field of war.

• My family and I live in this place in this time and we are able to raise our girls in the best possible schools in a peaceful neighborhood that we never have to leave.
• Sales of my books are up which means I have even more readers now.
• Costco is selling 6-packs of Moleskine notebooks (those are cahiers to you, bucko) with little attachable labels for 19.99 right under the shelf with the super pack of Uniballs.