Rocket Man

She packed my bags, last night, pre-flight, zero hour, 9am. And I`m gonna be high... As a kite by then....... This morning I woke up to the strains of Jazzercise from the community centre. I wandered over in the wet fog in my pajamas, to listen, and there they were. An army of middle aged women sweating in the roller skating rink, with piles of canned food everywhere as some sort of benefit for the food bank. I wandered off into the ghostly morning again, feeling that my cherry festooned pajama pants and Google shirts were not appropriate Jazzercise apparel. Underneath me the landlord's family has descended for Thanksgiving, and they are very present. Small children run, screaming, through the house, rattling my floors from below, and causing the cats to cringe. The washer and dryer are going all the time now, murmers over the turkey drift up through the floor and into my bedroom. Yesterday in the height of my flurry I was forced to endure inane introductions and finally bolted upstairs at a break in the conversation, citing "laundry or something." All the cats are sick, with varying degrees of action required on my part. Mr Shadow gets a pill twice a day for his dermatitis. Loki gets panacur in the morning for his irritable bowel, and I have to clean the litterbox constantly. Mr Bell is going in to get his ear lanced again in the morning. Sometimes, I wonder, you know, what I'm doing here. The problem with coming back to your hometown is that everywhere you go, faces accuse you of failure. I have great plans for next year, which are gently unfolding like a parachute behind me, but I'm afraid they might fail so I don't want to jinx them by awknowledging their existance, most of the time. I love being here, but I see now that it was too early to come back again, that I didn't leave enough of a break, to let people forget who I was, who I was supposed to be, what I was going to become. Who I should have been. My father went up to Oregon for Thanksgiving with his girlfriend, up to her sister's. This is the first Thanksgiving in a very long time I haven't had with him. Most years I travelled, sometimes across the country, to have Thanksgiving. One year we did a Japanese theme, I remember, and I made enough sushi for thirty people. One year we went Greek, another Chinese. This year I'm going to the house of an old friend, and we're having a vegan Thanksgiving extravaganza. It will be good to see old friends again--all of us orphans will be there. I made maple-pecan cookies which came out very well, and will be bringing those. Sometimes I really do wonder, don't you?