My Mother would stay up most of the night to make turkey for our family. She was ahead
of her time in that she owned music stores and was always working.Thanksgiving was her
day to tell her family she knew how to cook. Her turkey was so softyou didn"t need a knive to cut it. She left this world over 30 years ago,but I can still smell her kitchen on Thankgiving.
Today I am joining hundreds of other volunteers to feed many differant kinds of folks
a turkey dinner.It is a tale of two worlds that collide today. Laughter and football in one
world, long rows of tables with silent people eating. Broken people,sad people. Lots of nice people volunteer today to help. Tomorrow they will be gone. The silent people will go
back out in the cold night. The National Alliance on Mental Illness says Abraham Lincoln,
Winston Churchill,Virginia Woolf,Michelangelo,Tennessee Williams,MiKe Wallace,and other
famous people ,suffered from some form of Mental Illness. Not all homeless are Mentally Ill.A high percentage I run into on the streets are.My oldest son has Schizophrenia.
Later today,I am off to jail to spend some Thanksgiving time with my son.You wait in a waiting room before your allowed in to see the inmate.The 1% crowd IS there. They stick out like a masked man. They are nicely dressed. The men all wear suits. The Women make no eye contact with anyone and speak to no one.Our crowd always asks
how everyone is doing and howour loved ones are doing in jail.We wear jeans.
It is painful to visit someone you love in jail on a holiday. Their lives are boring and they know what they are missing. My son reads me poetry he has written. He is quiet good. His poems were always dark and dreary and about death. I finally have him writing about sunshine and rainbows. I buy his poems.
So there you have it, one Thanksgiving in one place in America, I hope YOUR day is a day that will move into the part of your brain that stores warm and happy memories.