A Thanksgiving Tale

The hazy golden dusk illuminated the sky behind their silhouettes in the cool evening air. The cars stopped and the elegant family of deer crossed. The leader had a staggering limp. Yet the two does stayed at her flank and did not attempt to cross quickly or ahead of her. The large buck, his antlers glorious and scenic against the autumn backdrop of mountains and sunset color, stayed back with the two infants as they gingerly crossed.

In the chaos of a grocery store I stood looking seriously at disposable pans when an elder gentleman approached softly.

“Are you going to make a turkey?” he asked.

I smiled at the man whose dark tilted eyes revealed close to a century of memories and Thanksgivings. His wife had fallen, he said. Thank the Lord she was home from the nursing home and rehab but she still couldn’t walk good. And well, his hip was killing him but he thought he’d come out and get a few things. A package of frozen hash browns and a plastic container of diced watermelon well out of season sat in his cart. One of his children was going to bring them a Thanksgiving feast.

He pulled from his inner pocket a photograph of his son to show me. Two photos, actually, side by side on a funeral program. A handsome young man in a navy uniform and one of the young man as a joyful middle aged man.

“This is my boy,” he says. “He got sick from the war and died.” He didn’t elaborate. He just folded the three year old paper and placed it back into his inner pocket. “Once he died my wife and I went downhill.”

Now, the crowds in the aisles bustling with noisy carts and lines of folks faded as I watched him hobble away.