The Ghost of this Thanksgiving past will not let me alone.

To be clear I have never been a Thanksgiving fan.

As a child Thanksgiving, and other such holidays, were primarily memorable for being occasions when my grandparents ignored me. These were normally the most attentive adults in my life, the ones that treated me more like an individual and less like a rank-holder in some disorganized organization.

As a teenager I began to suspect holidays were subversive efforts by the parents and teachers, who forever seemed to be in cahoots in their efforts to curtail my mind from losing focus upon their respective moneymaking and brainwashing obsessions.

As a father I dreaded holidays for it required me to referee squabbles and sniping bouts between the females of my family, over which of the competing matriarchs would have the honor of conducting the feast at her abode.

As a grunt grocer I liked Thanksgiving, as it was a paid day off. As a manager I dreaded it, for it meant a 22-hour shift, and reduced sales and increased expenses. [I know, that statement probably went more counter to your brainwashing than most of what came before it. In retail food Thanksgiving is nothing but an opportunity to lose business.]

I have come to regard Thanksgiving to be quintessentially American, or as American as propaganda can be without a war song. It is now, for me, as a writer, something to observe and comment on.

Thus spake the transplanted Harm City whitetrashian, as I checked the dates on the refrigerated bagels. As I rose to guide him and his lady I noticed that they were both bombed out of their mind. They were East Baltimore by their accent. He was dressed in greasy jeans and denim jacket, and her in floral pajamas, yellow wife-beater, fuzzy bunny slippers, and a pink coat with a fur-lined hood.

We walked down the meat aisle, at 1:15 on Thanksgiving morning, toward the turkey section, occupied by three chicken-sized turkeys. As I stopped to point them out he pitched into me, and would have smacked face-first on the tile if I had not been in his way. He apologized and they began arguing about other stores they had been to. I eventually found them a huge frozen turkey that they might have been able to thaw out by Friday or Saturday.

They went up front to have Bubba check them out and discovered that they had forgotten her purse, and his wallet was empty. Out into the icy night they staggered, arguing all the way. Mind you, these were walk-in customers. They did not drive.

At 2:45 she was back, in her bare feet, her pajamas soaked up to her ankles, without a coat, and her face raw from the freezing wind. She was beginning to sober up. Apparently, her lord and master was unconscious by now. She stood proudly with a frozen turkey that was larger than her torso, tiny and emaciated as she was.

Her credit cards were denied.

She had nothing but change.

Her ‘independence card’ had $7.12 left on it.

As Bubba shook his head in dismay, knowing that this was not over, she turned to Nokia and I, where we sat on the bench taking our lunch. We were not laughing. She fairly cried, “This is not funny! I hate it out here! I hate the County. I want to live back in Highlandtown, but we can’t! This is serious! I, will, be back for my turkey!”

Nokia and I watched her go, prancing out over the ice-covered asphalt. My female coworker gave me some chocolate [it was a KitKat, okay] and said, “That bitch don’t have no shoes on her feet, en got no ride! You know she got kids at home if she got a card. Where her man?”

She gave me another KitKat and I answered, “Oh, he was in here earlier, drunk out of his mind. I suppose he’s passed out at home. I have no idea what happened to her coat and bunny slippers.”

Nokia looked at me in disbelief, “Is you serious, he laid up at home en she out in dis shit?”

I shrugged my shoulders in a teen-like ‘I du-know’, and she lit up, “Oh, hellll no! Sheeee. Dat bitch gotta be out a her mind!”

Fifteen minutes later, the lady returned with her payment, tears streaking her face, nose running, “I told you I’d get my turkey. This neighborhood sucks!”

As our validated heroine waddled off under the weight of the turkey into the dark cold of night, Nokia agreed, “I suppose it do suck if you a dumb barefoot bitch out on da street in da middle of da coldass night!”

A couple hours later about 20 neighborhood guys played a game of touch football on the lot waiting for the boss to hand out free pumpkin pies. They then came in and bought their whipped topping, grabbed a spoon from the deli, and ate out on the sidewalk. That is a nice local ritual that made me smile.

I then began considering all of the people I knew who had taken this holiday seriously this year, actually telling me what they were thankful for, and asking me what I was thankful for. This was off-putting as I thank people every day and could not recall anyone I had left out. Abstractly I suppose I am most thankful for not having ben born in South Sudan. Of the four folks who asked this question one was Mexican, one Brazilian, one Iranian, and one Russian. So much for my take on the ‘quintessentially American holiday’. I know I’m not a very good America, but I mused, ‘at least Thanksgiving hasn’t been commercialized like Christmas’.

When I got back to work on Monday, after my four days off, which is what the holiday meant for me, I asked a Christian coworker how her holiday had been. She said, “My daughters had to have dinner wrapped up in the afternoon so we could be at WalMart before six, when they cut the plastic on the pallets. It was like a feeding frenzy; wall-to-wall people. Do people even eat Thanksgiving dinner anymore?”

That made me feel better for Mister and Mrs. Bigass Turkey, who may have enjoyed their version of a holiday meal as early as Friday, when the savage worshippers of our Supreme God were flooding his temples in their many millions.