I am grateful for my daughter Jennifer and son Andrew. As I related in earlier column, I hadn’t seen Jennifer in about 27 years until I went down to Jackson, Mississippi for her mother’s celebration of life. And now we text and talk over the phone and even exchange birthday cards. For someone whose personal life has someone dissipated over time and with age, that feels so good to me.

And then there is Andrew who lives with me in a condo that is owned by Heidi Pascual who might have lost it when she moved back to the Philippines back in 2010 if I hadn’t moved in and took over the payments. I am grateful that Andrew and I haven’t “killed” each other living in such a small enclosed space. We give each other space and do talk form time to time, although that is difficult for a father-son duo who live in such close proximity. It’s great to have him here.

And I am also glad to have the chance to have Andrew take over my non-profit accounting business. In five years, he has gone from knowing absolutely nothing about accounting to now doing the vast majority of the fieldwork. It has just been awesome and fulfilling to work side-by-side with him. God has truly blessed me with this.

And I am so thankful for all of my brothers and sisters and their children, my nieces and nephews. After all of these years, we still get along and get together for major holidays. I am especially grateful for my sister Katy and her husband Paul. They were involved in a head-on crash in rural Kansas over the Memorial Day weekend this year, a crash that took the lives of Paul’s sister, daughter and brother-in-law. But by the grace of God, Katy and Paul survived and are well along on the road to recovery. How can I not be thankful for that?

There were eight siblings in our family and 2-3 dozen nieces and nephews. And by the grace of God, we are all alive and relatively well today. How unusual is that, especially considering some of the risks that we took as children and as adults. I am incredibly thankful to God.

And then there is The Capital City Hues. , which I started back in March 2006. I immediately sold 60 percent of the paper to friends so that we became an African American, Latine, Asian American and Euro-American owned, written and read newspaper. I am very grateful to my partners who have hung in there. There are still eight of the original partners who are still members. One of them told me that he thought the paper would have folded a while ago and I could see his point of view. We survived the Great Recession of 2008 and the migration of advertising to electronic media.

And we kept physically publishing through the COVID-19 pandemic. Before the pandemic, there were all kinds of printed publications out there. But during the pandemic, it was basically the Wisconsin State Journal, The Cap Times and The Capital City Hues still publishing. We were the only free one out there. I think we are alive today because we kept publishing, thereby keeping our readership, subscribers and advertisers engaged. It gave our readership a sense of normalcy when they could read about people they knew. I was grateful for the opportunity to do that because it kept my life just a little bit normal too.

We are up to 100 subscribers now with about 90 of them fully paid and I keep praying and a wishing that they will return to the paying fold. While we hardly make any “profit” from our subscriptions, especially with the cost of postage going up on a regular basis, I do find them to be a source of support, that they are willing to invest some of their hard-earned money with The Hues.

I am especially grateful for our advertisers because we do need their advertising dollars to pay the staff, the writers, the printing costs, the delivery costs, the postage and payroll taxes among other things. I am grateful for all of our advertisers, both big and small, advertisers like UW-Madison and several of its components like DDEEA the Wisconsin Union and the WI ADRC, and Summit Credit Union and Madison College brought to us via Hiebing and KW2 advertising agencies respectively, UW Credit Union, Quartz, MGE and Housing Ministries of Wisconsin. There are the smaller advertisers like the Catholic Multicultural Center, Omega School, The Ritcherson Companies, Agrace Hospice and Foster Funeral Services who are equally important to us. We couldn’t do it without them and I am not ashamed to let them know how appreciative I am. I am so grateful to God. If I forgot someone, please take me to task and let me know. I appreciate you!

I am also grateful for our readership who pick us up every two weeks and/or visit our website. Sometimes I will get an email or a note from them that thanks us for continue to publish, that The Hues is an important element in their lives or just telling us to keep up the fight. This is hard work coming out every two weeks for going on 19 years. When the community shows us the love, we try to give it right back through the articles we publish.

And I can’t forget about the crew at Madison Media Partners who used to go by the name Capital Newspapers. Diane, Erik, Chris and all the rest, we appreciate the magnificent job you do printing our papers every two weeks. You print them with all of the beauty that we intend and I feel so proud distributing them. After 25 years of working with you — at The Madison Times and The Capital City Hues — I feel like we are family.

It takes a village to publish this paper. And I am so grateful to live in the village that I have. Please feel the love!