Thanksgiving without a Turkey Date Tuesday, April 23, 2024 - 03:49 AM PST Topic Experiences Time changes everything. Fifty years ago; we have pictures of our fathers and mothers staying at home and baking turkeys and letting pies cool on the window sill; mom at home and dad on the job. Maybe they had a TV if they were privileg'd, with maybe two or three channels that came in on the rabbit ears. The rest of them sat around the radio and listened to Jack Benny and thanksgiving specials. But time changes everything. And families have changed. I live in a state with a 60% divorce rate. It makes all the holidays interesting, to say the least. My friends who still live at home and learned to deal with the screaming no longer desire gifts, or food, or togetherness. They pushed away and back, and hate the holidays now. They all have a favored parent to spend the holidays with, but out of guilt or a feeling of fairness they spend it with one they favor less. It seems odd to balance family relations on a single day of the year; and it hurts them in ways that show only subtlely now, and will probably show more the older they get. My youth and family fell away from me in the place I live now; and things have gone on, rather than the world stopping for just a moment, as sometimes people require to cope. The world kept moving. The Starbuck's on the corner is unusually crowded on Thanksgiving morning, californians and locals cram in the door getting Mochas and Lattes and frappuchinos in model 98'-02' cars. A big black sheep dog sits by the door, big tongue lolling out while the kids stoop to pet him. The high ceiling has smoked glass lamps at the top of the high, red wood roof. I remember walking by from the pool hall on the way home when we had left elementary school, and passing by the abandoned gas station that was the lot the Starbuck's has come to be on. Allan is the one mechanic in town, and had moved when he finally couldn't afford the rent or to keep the place. The old Indian had moved in a little less than a year later, putting up expensively priced fur rugs on wooden rafters under the roof where the gas pumps had been. I saw him once, coming home from school after we had poured 5 dollars in silver and copper change into the jukebox to give the poor, drunk patrons of the pool hall an afternoon of "Disco Nights"... He was sitting in the shop, and through the grease-gray streaked windows you could see him with the can of skoal on the counter looking through the pages of Guns N' Ammo. THe pool hall and the Indian are gone.. And I feel responsible, somehow, for them going. When I left, so did they.. The irony was that the pool hall became a disco Karaoke hall. Sitting in a car for no particular reason, and waiting again. The door is open, to get the final smells of pine and chicken and beer from the downtown area.. The music of the ice cream van fades, and just above the din of the highway and the roads from the barrio to the south the gentle notes of the old romance song come to my ears. I sing along for a few moments before losing the song back to the constant hum of the city, slowed only slightly by the city shutting down for the evening for everyone to go home. A few chicano children run past in the twilight, back from the park and heading home. They are laughing and skipping in winter coats too large for them, legs impossibly skinny and jutting out like pencils from a massive solid body wrapped in thick layers of water-repelling cloth. I wonder if they're celebrating this day, this ideal. I wonder if they have turkey at home, as they skip into a vacant lot with an overturned shopping cart and broken glass bottles and bent street sign. Casinos are always open, I think back to the christmas where I spent an evening in the small cafe nestled between the buffet and Chinese bistro. A few elderly couples and families in from god knows where; an Hindi family in one booth and a small group of trourist Kiwis at a table and another of Greek students. But this is Thanksgiving. A year later, and here I am again. The line at the buffet is atrocious and the menu is worse, 6 different ways of cutting turkey and they can turn it into a paragraph of words written in a day-glow highlighter against a black fiberglass board. Quitting that line we head to the multinational cafe and have a basic meal. It's empty, the waitress doesn't want to be there and the busboy hasn't realized yet that his tips for the night aren't going to be much. Two CSI episodes and a special on Elvis on the tube, and I'm out for the night. I wake up with a sore neck and a cat hair down my throat. Macy's on the day after Thanksgiving is suicide; children fall off their parents by around noon; bored ones begin playing games and jump out at you screaming from around corners and from udner tables. The sales clerks are rushed, pushing Kermit the Frog dolls and praying for lunch. And praying to find parking spaces when they come back from lunch. They opened at 6 a.m., to push the Christmas earlybirds. Items to the first 100 customers, and purchase deals and contests. And on my way back to the hill, past a car wreck where I get to peruse the numerous bumper stickers of a white wiccan lesbian snowboarder, I see the lake. It hasn't changed from my youth. The mountains have a little bit of snow on them, and the afternoon sun plays the shadows of the trees along the road, cascading light running through the branches like fingers through rich brown and black hair. I'm tired. I've made my choices and run with them for as far as I have. I look back and wonder if Frost and Housman had the same regrets looking back on their lives. Sometimes I wonder. My movements are beginning to falter. Foundation's cracking. I want something. I was taught that with power and wealth the world is small, and appetites become insatiable; to the poor, the world is large and unconquerable, a thing of wonder and impalpability. Times are changing again, and I can barely keep up. "Ay, ay, ay, ay, cantas y no llores.. Porque cantando si alegra cielito lindo los corazones..." Maybe I shouldn't keep up. This article comes from Shmeng http://www.shmeng.com/ The URL for this story is: http://www.shmeng.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=432