Thankful for What Others Hold Dear

The 9-year-old girl in pigtails sat quietly with both legs crossed under her on the chair seat, holding the essay in her left hand and awaiting her turn. Printed in pencil on schoolkid notebook paper, the essay was titled “What I’m Thankful For.”

She was one of 15 grade school students from surrounding counties who’d made the finals of a Thanksgiving-week writing contest. On Wednesday, at Mimi’s Cafe in Costa Mesa, they’d find out who’d win the top three prizes.

Elizabeth Piercy, the 9-year-old, would say later she was nervous while sitting. She’d slept OK the night before but could feel her stomach churning through much of the morning before the event. Once there, she had to wait for nine other students to speak before she was called to the microphone. When she got up to speak, the butterflies vanished.

“I’m thankful for a lot,” she began.

From my close-up seat, it was impossible to hear the parade of stories without dabbing my teary eyes. That’s because we wish life could be all puppy dogs and bunny rabbits for them but know that it can’t be.

The poignancy in hearing them read their essays is that they know it too.

Still, whether their words depicted the innocence of youth or a deeper awareness, they all had found a way to be thankful.

A girl wearing a pink ribbon thanked “my mommy” for taking her to school and picking her up every day; a second-grade boy thanked the American couple that adopted him from his native China after his parents left him where a policeman could find him and take him to an orphanage; an 11-year-old girl who, like her father, has an autoimmune disease, described life as “a bucket of blessings” because both of them are making the best of things.

And then there was Elizabeth. She expressed thanks for friends and her mother and other relatives. And then her pets and other animals. Then, she wrote, “I have a story to tell you. I’m also thankful I’m alive because I have a brain tumor and I had three surgeries and I was in the hospital for about a week in December.” And then she mentioned a Make-a-Wish trip to Alaska and about what a kind and considerate teacher Mrs. Kelley was last year in third grade.

Afterward, I overheard Elizabeth’s mother, Ann, say of her daughter, “Amazing kid.”

Did she mean this moment or things in general? It’s all rolled up in one big ball, her mother said. “Anything she does she does real well,” Ann Piercy said. “With all she’s been through, she takes it all in stride. Nothing fazes her. She’s a tough kid, she can put up with anything.”

I asked what it was like sitting in the audience and listening to her daughter. “It was one of the proudest moments of my life, and it broke my heart at the same time,” Piercy said.

Elizabeth had three surgeries between December and March, missed 21 days of school and still got straight A’s at Christ Lutheran Elementary School in Costa Mesa, her mother said. The short shrift she gave the tumor, her mother said, “describes her focus on life. The tumor is not first and foremost. The fact she has a brain tumor, has had three surgeries and is likely to have more isn’t the most important thing in her life.”

Elizabeth won first place and a $1,000 savings bond.

I’ll let a sixth-grader named Leean leave us with our Thanksgiving thought. She wrote about her mother, a single parent who works three jobs and shops at the secondhand store so Leann can go to a private school. And about the grandmother at 80 who still works to help them pay bills.

With them, Leann found the path to thankfulness: “My little family,” she wrote, “believes that our faith keeps us strong and that we are not truly rich until we have things that money cannot buy.”

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana .parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.