The Approach of Thanksgiving

 

Have a happy drumstick, all ye mighty omnivores!
Break bones and suck marrow while ye may,
for winter is soon a-coming!

When I go to Thanksgiving dinner at my parents, bets are placed and smart punters have a line on what grade of disaster my mother will cook up this year. As long as she does not forswear cookery and the arts (?) of cuisine, Las Vegas bookies will still make book on her cooking.

Fortunately, this year I hear the smart money is on potatoes boiling over and mushy vegetables. This puts the old mind at ease since I am slipping out of the country to avoid the confrontation of irresistible force (hunger) meets immovable object (Stove-Top turkey stuffing in a box).

In the past, there have been regular Byzantine sieges in the kitchen:  butter set ablaze like Greek Fire to be hurled at the Turks; there have been onslaughts like World War I: pressure cookers exploding like infernal devices set by a platoon of sappers at Ypres; and many a great leader took a wound in the gizzard, and were thereby rendered hors de combat, like Albert Sidney Johnston at Pittsburg Landing.

So last year,the butter was burned badly, but it was discovered before the fats ignited, so that is a "feather in our caps". It stank, of course, and our clothes were imbued with its odor, so that is a "black eye".The people from the fire alarm company called a couple of times, and I wished them a "Merry" Thanksgiving; no one knew how to properly disarm the alarm, and it continued to intermittently do series of short blasts for about 20 minutes, and, come to think of it, we were doing a pretty good imitation of a ship of fools at anchor in a fog as thick as pea soup.

This was a series of "feathers in caps" and "black eyes" sort of at random.

A couple of other pots - the gravy, the potatoes - were set and poised to burn or boil over, but by now we were vigilant, and my mother launched into a long, keening epic of kitchen disasters and epidemics, once again forgetting she had turned the heat up to "high" to goose things along.

My father couldn't figure out what was going on. I told him we had to air out the house, so we would open the back door in the kitchen, which had a screen door, and the front door, which had no screen...so would he please make sure that his cat was in a bedroom with the door firmly closed; my parents are quite concerned with their overweight cat scampering out the door.

Very solicitous they are. One look at the feline would indicate that he might take it into his head to saunter towards an open door, but surely not scamper. Further on this train of thought, no largesome cat would take a powder just before the groaning board is put under full capacity, would they? Surely not. Anyone who had stuck with it during the early days at Los Alamos would surely want to be there with Oppenheimer at Trinity?! 

Thanksgiving is the A-bomb of gustatory finesse - or lack of finesse - so why miss "Carb-aggedon"?

So, he says the cat is fine, where's the fire? So I say, the fire's out, there was no ignition...howzat?...there was no ignition of the butter...howzat?...IT DID NOT START ON FIRE- almost, but it didn't. So, doors open...bow (pointing to the front) and stern (pointing to the back). I did this since everyone was Navy.

So make sure the cat's secured,mate!

The damn cat's alright! How do ya turn that damn thing off? ( at this point, the alarm was cycling through its tale of woe and alarum.)

Long story short, within 20 minutes he discovers the door to the bedroom open and his cursory inspection reveals no cat.

Who opened this door?

I don't think you ever shut it.

Howzat? Eh?

And so on.

No one stepped forward to take the fall for the open door incident. My niece's daughters brightly denied having done so, then turned at me and gave me one of those blah! blah! so there, mr. smarty pants! looks, and waved their little fingers around, as if I were the culprit. I shook a fist at them, and they ran away laughing. Shallow end of the gene pool!

Where's the cat? I heard again. Who opened this door?

I whispered that I had told you to close it; I did not want to be heard, but I did want to let the words out, for they began to choke me like oil on a choppy sea......whereon I am swimming from a shipwreck ( naufragium!) and trying to save myself, and not having much luck, and gulping down sea water and oil from the ruptured fuel tanks,  and waiting for the Titanic - on her wonderful maiden voyage - to swing into view to rescue me! Ah, peace and contentment at last!

My mother continued with her Agatha Christie tale of  "Dial M for Medium-High", a tale of crime and punishment, the heroine's well-intentioned flicking of the dials to "High" resulting in the nemesis of "Backdraft"!

I think...I strongly suspect that this is a sign of her insanity: she has always steered clear of friends and relatives that show any signs of being hazy or gave any indications of dementia, treating them rather like wounded pack dogs who will slow things down for the rest of the pack, and so have to be put out of their misery. So she long ago adopted the strategy of doing odd things in an obsessional way - even though she was demonstrably compos mentis - in order that when the time really came, she could always claim she had been doing it that way all along. She is a master mind of analysis; ask her.

None of the rest of us were remotely interested, and we edited this op-ed of  lack of interest with the punctuation of bored and loud yawns, but she read it all as huzzah! and encore!

My father became visibly upset when she told him she was giving us some left-over turkey, and not to worry, for she had all she needed for his soup, for it was the soup he truly loved, not the festal board where we peck at the bird itself - that same festal board oft ruined (according to my father himself) by the gowking e'en of kin gobblin' like kine! not fed since yestreen!  ( yes, that's e'en for eyes. you had to be there. and kine is cows or whatnot...one of those breeds which do not split the udder or the hoof or whatever it is they split or cleave or separate.) I fully felt he would go out front and begin going through the cooler, with which we had transported our share of the feast from home, and now was meagerly filled with turkey shreds. It began to feel like the holidays at Cold Comfort Farm.

I had picked up my brother - he has no drivers' license - and now he and my wife gave visible and audible rumblings of mutinous discontent and uprisings unless we cast off, and that right quick!

I cheerfully said it was time to go, and we pushed our way into the elements.

On the way back, my brother went "Oh, jeez!..." every time we passed a convenience store, slapping the back pocket where the wallet goes, or the side pockets where coins go, or the shirt pocket where  cigarettes go, and muttered something about smokes and not having any money...

But he said nothing about good Samaritans, so I did not offer. I don't think the real Good Samaritan bought a smoke for that guy in the Bible who was down on his luck. (Although we did joke about the ancient Assyrians: Hey Nebby Chadnezzzer...ya'll got an extra one o' them ziggurats!)

He had not taken a drink all night, nor did he smell of booze when I had picked him up. Now being out of money may explain not being soused when your ride comes to the door, but it doesn't explain why no free noggins o' rum were hoisted at the dinner. A miracle -almost -from the temperance view, and a market crash from the liquor producers vantage.

It's a bit too early for an instant-replay decision on a miracle...but I've been being a good boy, with a selfish interest in getting something good for myself if miracles are indeed being handed out. If his sobriety is how it works out, I suppose I can work up a good deal of enthusiasm...eventually; some of the good old baraka of the good metaphysics may splatter on me. It is very hard to say...

As the old hymn goes:

His ways of mystery to conceal,
God makes a really, really big deal...

or something along those lines.

reprint, mish-mosh, and amalgam