Thanksgiving Dinner

Thanksgiving Dinner How many more? I asked myself, and answers may be coming into focus with the flimsy recollection of that flock of chubby birds each settling down a final time upon audacious altars dedicated to a gentle greed of some implied profanity, but rubbed away by appetite and invocational acknowledgement of The Divine. I hardly know them anymore, and yet the love still circulates, (less inhibited perhaps) though somehow bourne in artifice by the enlightenment of youth and shrinking globe, the breadth of which we now may fly with ease. One guest I do not greet with great affection, though I know him well enough--the creeping thread of age advances like the moss upon a headstone, insideous in its meandering through time and unobtrusive as companion to the slow decay beneath. It's rather like a testamonial to all the goings on inside the little white faith-steepled church that guards it, also to its little flock of souls surviving, for they too must gather faithfully around the great, and toothsome bird content to rule today in silence there among his retinue of entrements. I think of Grandpa, more than 50 years ago there at the table's head-- now I must be the patriarch and assume his place, and yes, perhaps his imminent demise. (Quite suddenly I realize that's quite all right with me) So what is the point of all these memories? I think we need them just to salvage some significance, or worse, to craft a fleeting and illusory impression that a history in microscopic miniature somehow mattered for a moment in this heavy crazy quilt so solemnly laid down upon a dusty speck among the stars. ~