For this week’s Notes from Exile, I’m sharing an entry from my prison journal written on Thanksgiving 2018, my first holiday in prison. Towards the end of this piece, I began the streaming prose that I employed during the remaining period of my incarceration. It’s published here just as I wrote it on that day.

THANKSGIVING: FMC DEVENS 11/22/2018

Not every day is the same. Yesterday, with the sun rising, it somehow seemed like all was well with the world. Not this morning. Thanksgiving. My first holiday in prison. Certainly not like the other years: waking up in our cozy carriage house that my wife had decorated so warm and simple and inviting, the smell of the turkey in the oven, rousing the boys for the football game’s 10:00 start, the crowds at the game, the colors, each side in their assigned ones, beautiful forms of scarfs, hats, gloves, many people with dogs, the cheers, the little kids, the alumni kids, rushing home to prepare the bar, the appetizers which were always my responsibility before the crowd got to our house.

And then there were the other many Thanksgivings with my cousin in Vermont at that great house with it’s big roaring stone fireplace and the kids outside playing touch football, and you could hear them shouting, laughing, seeing them through the big picture window pretending to fall, celebrate a catch, a touch down, an errant throw and coming in finally with muddy shoes and you could hear them stomping their boots before entering, then coming in to warmth of the big fireplace which was loaded by my cousin and crackling perfectly like fireflies in the summer.

Not today. I forced a few Happy Thanksgivings to my prison mates. They were returned in half hearted mumblings and whispered mouthing’s. At meals today, everyone trying to make the best of it, but it didn’t really sell to any of us. Only that we’re all in it together. Everybody knows it. No need to say it. At least it was a nice weather day.

No one was talking at our table and I thought about Thanksgiving at my Aunts, when I was a kid and there was always a din: all my cousins and Uncles, Uncle Lou, Aunt Yvette, their kids, Bobby, Dicky, Yvette, Uncle Frank, my brothers, sisters, my cousin Chi Chi, my best friend all those years and the loud arguments, political and everything else, like which famous person was beautiful or ugly or brilliant or stupid and Grandpa and Grandma Telli, Grandpa, a little man who amazed us with his huge appetite and after the big dinner, watching the football games and seeming like we had just finished dinner and my mother and Aunt were making turkey sandwiches that were even better than the big dinner we barely just finished but somehow all of us still hungry, devouring those sandwiches on wonderful crunchy bread, and then finishing all the pies that everyone made, the pumpkin, the apple and the almond cake my grandmother made and in between we kids outside playing touch football with jackets off, shirts out, getting dirty in the muddy backyard till my father would shout us all inside and it was over.

All gone now. All of them.

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Notes from Exile: Thanksgiving