No, they’re not still here. And, of course, they knew that wasn’t Thanksgiving. Truth is, it was nearly Halloween. Today is Thanksgiving.

But it was a Thanksgiving visit, nonetheless, and this is a Thanksgiving story if ever there was one. We just hung on to it until the time was right.

What difference that the leaves turned golden and red and fell off the trees even if the pictures still look like October?

What difference that the days are cooler and short sleeves have given way to long sleeves and jackets?

A real Thanksgiving story deserves a holiday celebration and that doesn’t mean cranberry sauce even if you’ve got to have it with turkey. It means knowing what you’re thankful for. And the Coyles and the Strouds know. They’re thankful for each other.

Their Thanksgiving story started on Thanksgiving Day in 1956 when Virgil Stroud looked like a kid, and Johnie and Ruby’s middle boy, Richard, was a kid, sitting in front of the television set while mom bustled about in the kitchen putting the turkey in the oven.

But Richard kept hearing the announcer say, “Go get a lonely sailor and invite him home for dinner.” And before long Richard was calling, “Hey, Mom! Let’s go get us a lonely sailor and invite him home for dinner.”

At first she didn’t pay any attention.

But he and the man on TV kept at it, not knowing they were beginning a family Thanksgiving story that would still be sending an aroma of turkey seasoned with love across the country more than 40 years later.

“Mom!” Richard called again. And again and again and again, as insistent as the guy on TV. “Let’s go get us a lonely sailor.”

“We won’t find a sailor who’ll come with us,” she said. “You’d be afraid to just get in a car with somebody and go, wouldn’t you?”

Well, no, Richard wouldn’t, if the somebodies were his mom and dad.

And finally there was nothing to do but drive to town and hunt for a lonely sailor.

“We saw a few sailors,” Johnie says, but they were with each other. They didn’t look very lonely. “And then I turned up 4th Avenue, and there wasn’t nobody on the street. And I saw this tall sailor all by himself, looking in a store window. So we went up to him and I told him, ‘My three boys want to have you for Thanksgiving dinner.’ And I told him after dinner I’d take him back wherever he wanted to go, so he got in the car, and we went home. Just him and Richard and me. I saw he was a nice young man.”

They talked while they went, and Virgil found out Richard was 12 and Johnie Jr. was a year older and Danny a year younger, and they were all nice people, too. And Johnie found out Virgil, from Wadesboro, was stationed aboard ship and had to get back by 6.

And by then they were home, ready to eat.

But goodness!

“Mom was there bawling,” Virgil says. “Everything looked so good and perfect.”

“But I’d burned the rice!” Ruby says. “And I went to take the turkey out of the oven, and it was raw!”

“And I haven’t let her forget that for 40-some years,” Virgil says, laughing, “but that day I saw Mom could really cook a turkey when she turned the oven on.”

And he had been a lonely boy a continent away from home, window-shopping by himself on Thanksgiving day.

Back then, boys were drafted at 18, “and if you got out of high school, and you hadn’t been in service yet, you couldn’t get a job. Everybody would say, ‘We don’t need anybody right now, but we’ll keep you in mind.’ So I figured I might as well go on in and get it over with.”

“We moved a bed in little Johnie’s room,” big Johnie says, “and we had our fourth son. And we’ve loved him through the years.”

A lot of the time he was in San Diego, he was sick. First flu, then pneumonia and the Naval Hospital.

“And Mom was there every day from the time visiting hours started until late,” he remembers, “bringing me those good chocolate pies. I found out if I wanted something, all I had to do was mention it and it was there.”

“He was way out there in the hospital, and they went to see him every day,” his wife, Betsy says, “and he went to see them every weekend that he had a pass. They’d call his mom and dad and let him talk to them — and talk to them themselves.”

And after he came home, they kept it up.

“With the phone,” Johnie says. “And letters. We’ve loved him through the years. We wanted to meet his mother and his father so bad. We looked forward to that through the years, but it just never happened. And now it’s too late.”

“He feels like they’re his only parents now,” his wife says, and having them is important, considering he was an only child.

Virgil and Betsy were married in 1961.

“But I was dating him when he got out of service, and we’ve been in contact with them all these years,” she says. “We talked every couple of weeks.

“When our first baby, Sandra, was born, they sent her a christening dress. It’s the only thing we’ve really kept of hers.” Then their younger daughter, Ann, wore it and both girls have used it for their children.

But she’d never met them until they decided they had to come to visit. Pop was 37 when he picked Virgil up on 4th Avenue; Ruby, 32. Now he’s 80. She’s 75.

Virgil flew out to California to see them 10 years ago, and Johnie told Ruby, if Virgil thought enough of them to fly out there to see them, they certainly feel enough for him to go meet his family.

“We didn’t make it as soon as we wanted to, but we’re here now.”

Their own three sons are married and they have five grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren out there on the West Coast.

“And two granddaughters here” on the East Coast, Pop adds, “and four great-grandchildren, and wait a minute, their husbands, and ... ”

He just keeps ticking them off on his fingers, because a grandfather has to meet all those children, doesn’t he?

Danny called in advance to tell Virgil and Betsy that Daddy talks real loud these days and Mom would want to help in the kitchen and likes Cremora in her coffee.

None of that was a problem. Neither was entertaining them. No matter what Virgil and Betsy did, they enjoyed it. Betsy took Ruby to visit her mother, Lucille Edwards, who’s 95 now, and they thought about the beach and the mountains, but Mom didn’t seem up to all that travelling and besides, they fell in love with Rockwell and the neighbors and didn’t want to leave home.

Pop enjoyed going to town and shopping for a bale of straw and getting ready for Halloween and buying Betsy flowers. He wanted the biggest arrangement at the Flower Basket, but Virgil talked him out of that one. It was a funeral spray.

And he told Betsy, “I love you like my own,” and that included Virgil. “If you ever need a kidney, I want to donate it.”

And they loved looking at the pictures of the children growing up and the weddings and cooking out with the neighbors.

Like grandparents do.

“We wouldn’t have took nothing for this trip,” Pop said before they left.

And after they left, Betsy found “the sweetest card I have ever read with $100 in it.” And then she found another $20 attached to the pillow. And $10 under the telephone.

And she was about to send it back, but they called and said, “Did you find the money? You wouldn’t let us spend a penny.”

So they kept it.

And now instead of talking once a week or so, they talk every day. Usually more than once.

And Johnie and Ruby out in California and Virgil and Betsy in Rockwell all know exactly what they’re saying thank you for today.