Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday because it focuses on the right things: food, football and family.

When it's gray outside, the kids are home, the biggest stress is whether to choose pumpkin or apple pie, and you settle in to watch the Dallas Cowboys lose — well, it's time to give thanks.

I don't know how they celebrate Thanksgiving in schools today. It's extremely difficult to celebrate anything without offending someone. Maybe they just ignore it. In elementary school we used to celebrate with stereotypical and inaccurate historical costumes and pageants. It was fun. But when I was a senior in high school, I really learned what it meant to give thanks.

Latin was difficult for me. That's an understatement. By the 12th grade I was completely lost. That year we read "The Aeneid." It's a long poem written by a man named Virgil, and it's about Rome.

I can still remember its opening lines, "Arma virumque cano." By June it was all that I knew. We had lots of tests and I failed most of them. That was one reason I was not on the basketball team for the whole season.

For the final examination in June, our teacher, Father Minogue, said that he would choose about 30 lines of the poem. "Gentlemen, you will translate those lines and you will parse all of the words that I choose for you to parse."

That's what my friends said he said. I heard him say that I would fail the test and never get out of high school.

There were about a million lines in the Latin poem and he was going to choose 30 of them? Then he would ask us to translate? And parse? I knew what translate meant, just couldn't do it. But that "parse" stuff really confused me.

I asked Coffey, who knew everything, what the word meant. He said, "Parse? Well, if it's a verb, you know, you tell whether it's first person-singular-present-indicative-active. And if it's a noun, you explain what case it is and why. You do that kind of stuff for all the words."

That did not sound very familiar, so I wondered how I would tell my parents that I'd be around the house longer than we had expected.

My backcourt partner, Jimmy Cox, was a much better student than I was. Of course. But he was also worried about Virgil and his Aeneid. He said, "I'd like to get a really good grade, but there's so much to study." I said I'd like to get a grade above zero.

Wonderfully, the day before the test, Jimmy had a plan. "Get your textbook and your trot," he said.

So I found my textbook, which I had lost a month ago. And my "trot," the very literal English translation of the poem that I used when I was stuck, which was every day.

"We're going to figure out what lines Minogue will choose," said Jimmy.

"Good idea. How will we do that?"

"You go home and just keep looking. I'll do the same thing. Try to remember what Minogue liked to read out loud in class," Jimmy said. He had an advantage over me here because he could actually remember the class. "Call me tonight, and we'll prepare the ones you choose and the ones I choose."

It was a ridiculous plan, but the only hope I had.

At 11 p.m. I called Jimmy. Amazingly, out of the kabillion Latin lines, we both chose the same 30. They had something to do with a guy named Priam. We memorized the translation. Jim taught me how to parse the Latin words by looking at the English ones, and I memorized that, too.

If we were right, Jim would ace the test and the course. And I'd be able to plead for mercy and a diploma with a straight face.

The next morning I sat in the last seat in the row. Jim sat in the first seat.

Father Minogue entered and distributed the test. "Take one and pass it back," he said. And Jim did. But before he passed the tests back his fist went up and he said "Yes! It's Priam!"

It was time to give thanks.