Happy Thanksgiving-

Thanksgiving of 1967, my parents, five kids, and two cats left Houston for Tucson in a Pink Cadillac pulling a U-Haul trailer in search of....

I don't know- fortune, adventure, freedom? They lived the dream/nightmare of it for about twenty years, then died in Las Vegas- a little less than twenty years ago (a year or so apart).

I made my way out of their mess in 1968 when I started college at the University of Arizona on what I was told was Linda Ronstadt's scholarship- Dr. Bloom told me that. He's long dead also.

I don't know what happened to the cats. The kids (besides me)live in various states of fucked-up in Nevada, California, and Alaska, I think, we don't have much to say to each other anymore. The U-Haul got pushed over a canyon in northern Arizona after they realized the late fees would be astronomical. That's what I was told.

Here in Richmond, Virginia all that seems very far away and fantastic. I don't make much of holidays. We'll have turkey. My kids have a very thin legacy. Be kind, do no harm, share what you have. A nod to tradition.

At three a.m. I feel very alone, I wonder how much time I have, I wonder why it matters. I live in some fear the Pentecostal heaven they taught me about might be true: where when you die, you get reunited with all your relatives.

I have a 22 pound turkey in the trunk of my car, frozen solid. The store where I bought my pre-cooked meal (Cajun Fried turkey and fixens) was selling them for 17 cents a pound if you spent forty dollars. I'm trying to give it away. All the agencies were closed by the time I got home from the store. I'll call around again tomorrow, there is surely someone who can use it.

Probably my brother could, or my sister- but they're too far away.