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.

And when it became time for me to book my flight to Carolina, they both insisted that Clifford was fully able to enjoy the same activities we always shared — the band concert, the fine regional theater, the holiday parade, the daily hearts games at a dollar a corner. He was and we did. And that’s when I was introduced to The Book. It was in manuscript form then, and I read it on their porch above the evergreens and marveled when I heard its history.

He had begun writing a year ago and was well into it when the medical crises started to happen. And throughout that dismal period he worked with the same dedication and determination he drew on five decades earlier, when he introduced in print the teenage inventor, Alvin Fernald, whom Walt Disney Productions embraced; the story was turned into a full-length movie.

The book I read in manuscript is called “Alvin Fernald’s Incredible Buried Treasure,” and it’s a wonderful adventure story.

The buried treasure is the first draft of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, and the book describes how an ingenious young man, born into slavery, escapes his plantation and makes his way to Washington where his story intrigues Lincoln.

They become friends and journey together to Gettysburg.

It’s in book stores now, so if you have a teen around who resists history, you might want to look into Clifford’s book. Admittedly it is what you might call creative history, but what the heck, it could have happened. And the adventure is good reading.

There are some other benefits to me beyond history for which I’m thankful to Rae and Cliff Hicks on this year’s day for giving thanks. By far the most important is refusing to simply roll over and buy into all the negative cliches about aging.

Don’t make it easy for that to happen. Write the book in your drawer, whatever symbolic form that vision might take.

“He’s tough,” Rae told me about her husband, who will be 90 in August.

So is she. I had them on the phone a few minutes ago, and their parting shot was, “We’re already looking for you next July.”

I’ll be there.

And I can’t leave this day without a special thanks to a very special granddaughter who will be sharing it with me.

JOSEPH N. BELL lives in Newport Beach. His column runs Thursdays.