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 $&KULVWPDV2UDQJH6WRU\ This is the fourth Thanksgiving we’ve spent with Jay and Penny in Oak View, a village near Ojai, California. They have a long house that sits on the broad spine of a hill, and their back porch looks out to the mountains beyond and the highway that dips in and out, stringing little clusters of buildings together. From there they can watch the big summer sky slowly darken from east to west, watch the darting headlights of cars speeding home on the ribbon of dust that hangs over the road. The complex looks like an old homestead. There are two horse stalls, a pigpen, and a chicken coop. All the animals are long gone; the stands are now only crumbling wood and rusted wire. Dry needles and leaves of ancient pines and elms cushion the ground. There is a sump that sometimes emits pungent odors. Buzzards spin overhead. On these Thanksgiving evenings on the porch, I feel a quiet amazement at all that transpired before, all that changes and continues to change. It seems important to set it down before, like the orange sunset, it disappears altogether: the bucolic setting where we feel the silent movement of time, the creeping knowledge that we, like the horses, pigs, dogs, and chickens before us, will one day be gone. Did I say “silent”? We are raucous. Jay, Penny, Tina and Naomi (Jay’s girls), Bernie (Penny’s mother), Joy, Victor, and Alyctra (now almost five), an architect, an author and his wife (a schoolteacher), their three sons, and myself. And two dogs. No one says a serious word. We are all comedians. Even the dogs are irreverent.   

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