Photo by TONY WOOD

[My Thanksgiving Day post, two days late.]

A bad cold was kicking my ass, but I felt the need for sun and exercise in the late afternoon. All around me was that weird holiday stillness and quiet, as if everyone had gone somewhere and I’d missed the boat — a boat I wouldn’t have wanted to board.

The Anvil Ironworks was closed, and so were Taqueria La Veracruzana and the Chinese medical clinic and Giordano’s and even the horrible little pastry shop where The Lady of the Planets makes on-the-spot prophecies. I ran down Washington Avenue, on the side where there was sunlight and long shadows. The sun was warm and seemed like it didn’t want to set, but the Earth would not cooperate and, by 4:15 or so, the sunlight was gone.

The signage in my South Philly neighborhood spoke to me — DIM SUM EVERY DAY and NO WAY OUT and, on a little patch of earth, next to a recently planted tree: PLEASE NO DOGS. It’s a goal of mine — to please no dogs, ever again.

The only people on the street were kooks and scavengers, which means I didn’t feel out of place. Most notably, my elderly neighbor Angelo was outside with part of his inexhaustible trove of antiques, as he calls them, lined up for inspection in the mini-parking lot next to his home.

“Happy Thanksgiving,” I said, and he looked at me as if I’d just put a curse on him. He has many real and imagined enemies.

“I thought for a second you were that guy from the Colombian mob,” he said.

Then he went back to his antiques, which he is always wading through and organizing and throwing out, or so he says. I think he’d go completely mad if he ever really threw out that stuff.

I know exactly how he feels.