That Thanksgiving long ago

November 13, 2018

Thanksgiving looms over us again; though this is year of troublesome anniversaries, a year in which numerous significant events of my past are celebrating a half century – a passage have largely ignored over the year yet can no longer escape since Thanksgiving 1968 was an event I cannot easily forget.

Prior to that year, I had previously watched the Thanksgiving Day parade take place via TV, always wishing to attend since like most Americans growing up in post-World War II, I had been indoctrinated in the mythos of that holiday and how it always began the inevitable march towards Christmas.

Hank and I had discussed the holiday and its parade a year earlier when both of us got stuck working at the Fabian Theater as ushers on Thanksgiving 1967. While I did not consider it more than idyll talk at the time when we both needed to relieve the boredom of a night when nearly nobody went to the movies except the loneliest of the lonely or the most down and out to keep warm.

Hank did not think of it as idle at all and so called me up a few days prior to Thanksgiving a year later to make plans.

I met him in downtown Paterson where we both hopped on a bus to New York City, Hank singing Arlo Guthrie’s Thanksgiving song the whole way.

It was bitterly cold; so, we took refuge in a coffee ship along the route where Hank met up with and arranged a later date with a Hari Krishna girl, who had run away from her home in New Jersey to take part in something significant, yet could not quite live up to the strange and strict traditions of her order, and ached too much to have sex, and picked Hank to have sex with.

She laughed too much at Hank’s bad jokes and she even claimed to like The Beatles and might have taken up with me had Hank not already put his hooks into her, and I was too much of a friend to compete with him for her affection.

Now, all these years later, long after Hank has left this mortal coil, I wonder what became of her.