The steel pot bubbles slowly with parsley, onion, carrot, a turkey neck, and heart making a stock for the gravy.  The bird still cooks in the oven.  The Wracks is helping grandma make the thanksgiving repast.  White potatoes in a cauldron boil merrily and pureed yams with marshmallows on top wait to go into the oven when the turkey comes out to cool.  Long green beans boil too, waiting to be drenched in olive oil and salted with garlic.  Two store-bought pies wait on the table, to go in the oven after the yams, blueberry and cherry to top off the super Thanksgiving meal.  Then come the guests.

First arrive the Fonz with his Beau, a brunette, whom he found at junior college that seems to get along with the tall, gangly strapping man dressed in Levi denim with a white shirt and tie.  She comes in a one piece dress with high heels, and gold earrings, and her light brown skin somewhat match the brown mahogany table where dinner is to be served.  Together, they go and sit on the couch, in the family room near the dining room table.  Soon the doorbell rings again and the Wracks answer it.  In steps Kool in black dress slacks with a white short sleeve shirt opened at the chest.  His long goldish brown hair with a permanent wave adorns his head like a rock star on stage at a concert somewhere near.  The Wracks could just imagine the shining sprinkles placed in his long golden locks.  His date is even better.  She wears a two piece suit over a mini-skirt way above her knees.  She is southern Italian with sandy blond hair down to her waist, and blue eyes with a steely gaze.   The Wracks imagines the two as Atalla the Hun reborn and Circe the enchantress, she is that exquisite.   The Wracks does not have a date, he doesn’t have any money.  Kool pulls out a cigarette and lights up and the two go and sit on the couch in the living room where the Wracks join them.  They talk teen talk and Kool asks for a beer so he brings him a Michelob and Maria a glass of white wine. 

Father Wracks rings the wine glasses with a spoon and yells, “Come to dinner”.

 The table is lengthened with two inserts to accommodate the eight people.  Mother and father sit at the poles of the table while the Fonz and his date sit next to father Wracks and Kool and Maria sit opposite the Wracks and his grandmother Theresa.   Father Wracks passes around a bottle of Johannesburg Riesling and everyone fills their glass and the meal begins.  

Let us say a prayer and thank God for another year with good food and our friends. 

The Wracks bows his head and says “amen”.

The guests line up at the buffet, placed on the alcove of the pass-through in front of the kitchen.  Everyone piles their plate high with turkey, stuffing, candied yams, garlic beans, and mashed potatoes, and covers everything with a light coating of brown gravy.  Everyone eats while Christmas music gently plays over the intercom from the stereo. All the guests get seconds and sit down and eat and another bottle of wine opens and is passed around the table.  Grandma takes her turkey wing and puts it on the Wracks plate.  “Eat it she says.”   The Wracks stands up and clears the plates and sets them in the sink to be delivered to the dishwasher presently.  The hot pies come out of the oven and are placed on mats on the table with a red tablecloth with a brown cornucopia set in the center.  Then the guests eat pie.  Huge slices of fruit pie slavered in whipped crème from Ready whip aerosol containers.   Everyone is done so Grandma serves Yuban coffee from a decanter into fine porcelain cups with a green band around them and green saucers below.  Kool pushes his chair back, smiles and lights up a cigarette.   Maria looks at the Wracks and then the Wracks clear the dessert dishes.  All the guests including mother and father Wracks move to the living room and father Wracker breaks out a bottle of Courvoisier cognac and small sifter.  The cognac passes around the room.  The Wracks and grandma do the dishes.  They fill the dishwasher with the first load and set it going then start to scrub the pots, pans and baking dishes with steel wool.  The short load finalizes and the Wracks puts away hot ceremonial China in its place in the boxes where it is used several times a year.   Next, the pots and pans place into the dishwasher and a second load begins.  Grandma washes the fine crystal stemware piece by piece and the Wracks dry the glasses with a cotton towel and place them in the cupboard in the family room.  After they are finished grandma goes back to her room and the Wracks joins the guest in the white living room with green and white shag carpeting.  The bottle of cognac is nearly finished the guests sit back in their chairs and digest the holiday meal.  Kool lights up another cigarette. A heavy smoker, it doesn’t seem to bother him when paddling in big surf.   Christmas music plays on.  Around nine o’clock P.M.   The Fonz and his date excuse themselves because she has to be home.  Kool and Maria are next to leave and Kool asks the Wracks if he wants to go to the Over the Rainbow club with him and his date.   The Wracks declines politely.   They leave the house and Kool sits Maria in the front seat of his F-250 red ford truck with huge wheels and they blast off into the night.  The Wracks thanks his mother and father for a delicious meal and puts away the turkey carcass into the refrigerator for leftovers tomorrow and check his grandma and then goes to his room.   He thanks the Lord for his family and Thanksgiving and his friends and another day of life.  It was a wonderful thanksgiving in his youth and he will have a lot more.   “Bon Appetite,” says Marvin and have a wonderful Thanksgiving. 

My heart is a mirror.  Everything can fit inside and it looks outside in Panavision. My heart is all yours if you want, and it never dies; it lives there to show you a reflection of what you want it to be, just like a mirror. My heart can never exist, if you go away and leave an empty space that cannot show your image as a reflection.  I can shout this out to the world and if someone would just believe in their dreams and then act upon it, it would all become true.

Green is the color of money.  Green is the color of life that lives and grows and renews itself yearly.  Green grows as a color everywhere and the ocean becomes green every year in the spring.  Green lives as the color of the world that surrounds us.  The house on Mellowmans’s Lane is green, green like leaves, green like hundred dollar bills, and green as an emerald in the mouth of a toucan in Columbia.  The green house on Mellowman’s grows like trees and seems new and never fades, and not one person has been seen coming or going from the green house.   The wrack notices the green house.  From youth he felt the force inside the house.   From youth his curiosity might have killed him because each time he hunted on or near the green house; he felt the numbness of ending and finality.  The green house sits in upper middle class suburbia, in an upper class area, filled with upper class and professional people. The green house seems to be painted often as the green gleams newly as a painted house does.  The shrubs outside the green house appear manicured perfectly like the plants around the Small, Small World ride at Disneyland in Anaheim California.  Perfectly groomed dicondra surrounds the green house without a single weed apparent. Not a track shows.   Wracks searches for a four leaf clover in the dicondra next to the house until he feels the numbness overcome him and he has to draw away, far away.  The dicondra shows every footprint that treads upon it and the footprints of Wracks slowly disappear as though he never trespassed and a wrack does not know why.   Wracks never found his four leaf clover there, never found any luck and once saw a tall oriental gardener with a lump on his neck trimming the bushes meticulously by hand.  The gardener would look at wracks and wracks imagined that his eyes glowed but Wracks new this was hallucination, because the eyes of people do not glow, and the man eventually went away.  Wracks looks at the green house but common sense tells him never to knock on the door.   One Halloween Wracks and Koest knocked on the door but no one answered but a light burned on like a reading lamp and through the glass kost and Wracks thought they saw the figure of a person in a large armchair reading but this could have been a false impression.  Wracks felt the force and never again would he seek candy there on Halloween, even if the lights were on.  That year he and Koest had to content themselves to assault with tear gas provided by the sociopath at the log cabin house on Bacon way situated to face the green house.

Wracks went to college and would hitch or take the bus to and from the Big University.  Every day walking up the hill to Bacon way Wracks sees the green house, the pretty green house that maintains itself perfectly with manicured shrubbery and that big dicondra lawn without a single weed or footprint rendered upon it.   When Wracks life became half done and the parents sold their house on Bacon Way, the green house still sits there with nary a person coming to or fro or enters.  This situates in the last century and the river runs full under the bridge and careless and useless things pass under the bridge to be lost forever, and ever.  Wracks never went back and never will and a large Hydrogen bomb sits inside the house waiting for someone to say hello.

It feels in this mind’s eye the feeling of life and beauty and truth and birth and fulfillment.  It seems in the mind’s eye that right and justice and truth will ultimately prevail but at a horrible cost to everyone.  As to why and when it is or will become, the mind’s eye will not tell him why.  Wracks do not know how, but when he was a child, a man wearing a robe with a crown said to him, “We are but a whim in the mind of Allah, and he showers us with his tears.  Wracks life goes on and with him the memories of youth in whimsical traces, and the life goes on.

What is or did live in that house occurs beyond the imagination and the word never can be spoken or believed, or disavowed.   The wrack knows who lived in the green house but refuses to believe it himself because the vision flows like a wretched hallucination in a drunken debauchery.  The bomb still lives there behind closed doors in Wracks imagination and he will never again return to Tranquil Hills. If you pile up depleted uranium, when a critical mass achieves, fission begins and lights off the hydrogen bomb.   The rooms next to the bomb stuff full with spent battery casings like a huge pyrotechnic display in the making in the imagination of a wandering mind somewhere far north in nowhere.

There exist words that everyone speaks but few practice or believe.  Words like truth, honesty, friendship and mostly justice.  Justice looks truly beautiful and I have seen her and she tells me that truth lives and waits for you.  She doesn’t have to posture or take off her clothes or say anything more because her smile and her eyes and her manner reveal all that is good and real.  Justice lives where the light shines and light shines brightly for those who really want to see and sight shines out there for everyone who wants to look. Where the light is, is where your heart lies, and it is your heart that cannot lie to you.  Follow your heart, think with your mind and believe with all your feeling and the future will become real and all yours.  Transcend obstacles because hurdles are only to be surmounted and death does not hurt.  Evil, prejudice, and inequity are the pains that we might have to live with.  Goodness leaves a good feeling and the others don’t and the integral of positivity and optimism yield a positive first derivative and a second derivative in the fourth dimension.  What it is all adds up, and positive values cumulate  and non-positive values subtract.  What I am trying to say, is that the way is toward the light and no other path exists or matters and this is why.

He does not want you to look at him because he has become horrible to behold. This time is a hallucination or feeling of total emesis.   His hands warp into claws and he has eyes like a cat, dark complexion and thick black wavy hair.  His teeth are all canines because he eats meat and nothing else. He eats any kind of meat.  He wears black and purple clothes because black is his color and purple signifies royalty and the only colors he sees are orange and purple, grey and black and nothing in between.  In his demeanor breeds horror, and death and wanting and hunger that never can be satisfied and he asks you to denounce your religion and follow him.  In this revelation and the horror, god installs cruelty that cannot be cured, forever.  His friend is tall and slender and reminds someone somewhere of a snake. The blond has blue eyes, a long head and hands like him transfigured by the lord into claws of revulsion, hate, deception and torture. He wears a long robe with nothing underneath.   He too, asks a soul to denounce his faith and follow him.  He and he promise riches beyond the imagination, hot women that never satiate and a life of action, adventure, lust and carnage.  They don’t accept no for an answer. They never have and never will, and this pauper looks for time to end and for his children to grow up   and start their families so he can finally find rest. 

Life is beautiful and offers something to everyone.  What this life offers a soul is the truth and a truth that no one can ever cloud, obfuscate, purvey or destroy.  In this life and the truth with justice, beauty and faithfulness, the powers manage to support until ends and means are met. However, who wants to be a shaolin monk in the streets holding a rice bowl? Better are the other fifty-one percent.  Venus could be a Russian and she has blond hair and she promises something somewhere forever. The Chinese other is a favorite.  She likes to ride and wields a sword like a man and has no other.  She carries a dagger in a leg scabbard and stabs anyone who tries to approach me. Aphrodite is in Russia when the other is too tired to go out.  When you see the light, dreams and hallucinations are enough to satisfy this life in the promise of something better, longer and faster. In acceleration to the speed of light, I can love and in this love is everything and what more, another child.   The emperor of China told his people to multiply for this reason and this reason only.  And I have seen the shining light.