Thanksgiving

I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving. It was great to spend time with family that I haven’t seen in months. I’m looking forward to seeing everyone again for Christmas. It was also sad to see my ailing father, who’s suffering with metastatic Prostate Cancer to the spine. This may be his last Thanksgiving and Christmas on this earth. My dad has always been a very hard working Electrical Engineer and he would always have some huge remolding project going around the house to keep him busy. Now you see a man that’s frail and he sleeps most of the day away. It was very hard for me to watch him loose his balance as he walked around the house. He turned eighty this November 1, and it will probably be his last birthday but, he still tries to put up a front that he’s the same on dad. To sit there and listen to my mom talk about how bad off he is, it took everything I had to hold back to tears. This is a man that took on another man’s five children without even a blink of the eye. He has been more of father to me and my siblings than our own father. I overheard him talking on the phone to one of his friends from Detroit, saying that he didn’t like sitting at home waiting to die. That just broke my heart. He asked me to make him a sweet potato pie, and my mom overheard and said no, but I made it anyway. I told her that I know that he’s a diabetic but, he dying so let him eat a little pie. Once the pie was done, his eyes lit up like a kid on Christmas morning. We all spent time together just talking about any and everything. I love the holidays this is my favorite time of the year; being with family and friends that you treasure oh so dearly. People forget the true meaning of Christmas and get caught up in the commercialism of it all. Don’t get me wrong I like to shop just like anyone else; I just don’t care for the crowds of rude people. I can remember years ago standing in long lines at Toys R Us and Wal-Mart to get some new toy for one of my children. Standing out there at four in the morning waiting for the store to open so, I could get whatever it was that they wanted. I guess someday far away in the distant future, I will be standing out there for some toy that my grandchildren want.