[PARENTAL WARNING: Stupidity and Explicit Language (Double-whammy, Bitch!)]
Turkey rocks. I used to hate it when I was a kid. And this drove my parents nuts. Try as they might, they could never get me to eat more than a couple bites.
For the longest time I wondered what sick people thought of celebrating Thanksgiving with a turkey dinner. Turkey sucked, and if anything, it only made me thankful I had the rest of the year to enjoy real food: cheeseburgers, pizza and chocolate ice cream. MMM!!!
Things have been different the last couple of years. I love turkey. We never get enough! Why not have it more often I wondered.
Beats still suck, though.
Last year I got to spend Thanksgiving with my parents. And as luck would have it, both my parents and my sister were hosting Thanksgiving dinners this year!
Hell yeah, motherfucker.
Thanksgiving afternoon was slowly passing us by. Mom was watching over our bird while Dad drove up to Walla Walla to see how things were going at my sister’s house. This was Lyn’s first Thanksgiving dinner, and boy was it tasty! I’m getting a bit ahead of myself, though.
Back at mly parents’ place, Mom was once again checking the progress of our turkey. MMM!!! I loved the smell! She opened the oven to have one more look at the thing – looking for whatever it is you’re supposed to look for when you cook one of those things. What happened next scared the living hell out of both of us. (I mean Mom and me; That punk Turkey of ours really didn’t give a rat’s ass.)
After looking at the damage later, the conclusion we all reached was that the burner had a crack, and it finally broke all the way through. We think, but aren’t completely positive, that some of the juices of the turkey spilled onto the element and that may have had something to do with the fireworks our oven burped out that instant.
In the blink of an eye, and without warning, something in the oven exploded with blinding light and a loud crackle – with my poor Mom right there, at most a couple feet from the epicenter of this disaster. Sparks shot at and around my Mom, all the way to the wall ten feet behind her! It was like an illegally opened fire hydrant on a hot August day in New York City. Except instead of spraying jets of cool, soothing, water onto relieved and playful children, this thing blasted death rays all over my poor, terrified Mom.
I was standing a good fifteen feet away. Before I knew it, my Mom was right beside me. I have never seen a person move so fast before or since.
* * *
It was Easter, the following year. Rather than fix the heating element in the oven, we just got a whole new oven. That was one good thing. Another benefit from last year’s fireworks display is that our dog gets the Hell out of the kitchen when we start cooking. Like I always like to say, there is a silver lining on every cloud. The only other thing in our house she’s that terrified of is the weed eater. But that’s a whole ‘nuther story.
So anyway, we decided to do a Turkey dinner at our place this Easter. (Yay!) We invited my sister and her family – her husband and her two little daughters. One was nine and the other was six. They came over after an Easter Egg Hunt at the park. The girls had a blast! Well, at least the younger one did. There were no hobos hiding in the playground equipment this year, so it was kind of mediocre for my older niece. There was lots of chocolate candy, lots of screaming kids and a creepy guy in an Easter Bunny suit who seemed to like kids a little too much. They even had pictures of kids sitting on the bunny’s lap for crying out loud! It was like the best parts of Valentine’s Day, Halloween and Christmas (oh yeah – Thanksgiving) all rolled into one!
“Uncle David! Uncle David!” The youngest called. “Wanna see a picture of me and the Easter Bunny?”
“Why, sure, kiddo! Nothing I’d love more!”
“DAVE!” Mom barked at me.
I couldn’t hide the sarcasm, but luckily, she was only six, so she didn’t pick up on it. I hope.
“You’re so silly!” The older one wanted to pick on the younger one. “When it was her turn to sit in the Easter Bunny’s lap, she started asking for Christmas presents!” she teased.
“Hey, be nice to your little sister!” my sister told the older one.
“Okay,” the younger one sulked.
“I told the Easter Bunny I wanted Hanna Hontana makeup/coloring books/etc. ad nauseum…” I’m only paraphrasing this one because my brain tunes out when I hear words like “Hanna Montana,” “makeup” and the like.
“Oh cool!” I was on auto-pilot.
“And then he said he would tell Santa for me.” She grinned wide, showing her two missing teeth and nodded real big.
“Uncle Dave! Come sit with us so we can eat together!” It was such a cute offer from my niece! Unfortunately I don’t consider myself to be much of a kid person. I “abhore” kids the same way Chris Farley “had a bit of a drinking problem.” (Of course, I also had a drinking problem, and yup – that’s another story. Quit distracting me like that!) But I’m an uncle, and it6’s my job to be kid-friendly when the nieces are around. So I joined them.
With auto-pilot fully engaged, I coasted through the first few minutes (or seconds? I really don’t remember) of our dinner. I switch off the thinking part and leave the talking part on. That way I can still drop short phrases every so often just to reassure the kid’s I’m still here. My memory of this moment is a little hazy. But I’m pretty sure someone said something about the little one not liking Turkey. I also knew my thinking part wasn’t completely shut down because I found myself wondering – “Just what are my nieces’ names again? I just go around calling them the older one and the younger one. I’d ask them their names, but boy, would that be awkward!“
There was something about making the younger one starve if she didn’t eat the damn turkey.
“Cool!”
Oh Crap. Did I just say that, I wondered? My sister and brother-in-law shot brief “WTF!?!?” glares at me and moved on. Either I didn’t say it or they’re so used to stuff like this coming out of my mouth that they learned to blow it off.
I zoned out again. My memory is a funny thing. (as in exploding-Pinto funny, not hah-hah funny) Usually when the shit hits the fan the only thing I do remember are those just before switching to auto-pilot, and those last two to three seconds just before “waking up.” It’s like the black box on a passenger jet, only preserving a record of events just leading up to the crash. I really wish I had a different analogy than this, but unfortunately, in this case, it is frighteningly fitting to what happened next.
“Uncle Dave! Look! It’s the Turkey!” The younger one said with much more enthusiasm than I had expected.
Without missing a beat, I turned to hear with the biggest and cheesiest grin I could muster and said, “No, sweetie! That’s not a turkey! It’s the Easter Bunny!”
Have you ever had one of those accidents where the air bags deploy? That was the kind of shock I felt just this moment.
The airbag thing is just freaky. No squealing tires, no long drawn-out glass shattering like they have in all those movies. One moment you’re driving along. A car jumps right in front of you, and you slam the brakes. In a fraction of a second, your car lurches, the Anti-lock Braking System engages and you hear and feel a grinding sound (unless you’re driving sideways on standing water – skidding tires are real quiet on water, FYI). And then “POP!!!”
In a daze you just know something is not right. Your car’s not moving and it’s quiet – until you realize your horn is still blaring and your hand isn’t even on the friggin’ steering wheel! Smoke starts to bellow out from the dash and your steering wheel and you think “HOLY SHIT! MY F*&%ING CAR IS ON FIRE!!!” You then realize this isn’t the case when your dash – no wait… – some canvass-looking thing is deflating.
It was kinda like that.
Did I actually just say that to my younger niece? Because if I did, this was gonna be freakin’ sweet, or very bad. Heh, if nothing else, I guess you could say I just sprinkled a dash of April Fool’s Day into this little holiday stew! “Man! I should do stand-up!” I thought to myself.
And then, all Hell broke loose.
Remember that thing I told you about a couple paragraphs back? About the air bags, and the horn that would not stop? My niece’s bawling was kind of like that horn! Loud, non-stop, and after a couple minutes a little hoarse. Except this time I couldn’t just open her up and yank out the battery cables to shut her up. That trick only works on cars.
“What the HELL is going on out here?!” Ohhh poo.
My brother-in-law was pissed off. I’m not exactly sure how to describe this guy. He’s one of those people who just looks pissed 24/7. He knows this, and is damn proud, too! I envy him for this.
Anywho, so yeah, he looks pissed ALL the TIME. Ed McMahon could show up on his doorstep with a Ten Million Dollar prize, congratulate my brother-in-law for winning all this money, and then apologize sheepishly for breaking this wonderful news to him as he backs off cautiously to the Publisher’s Clearinghouse Van.
Aside from that, my brother-in-law is one cool cat.
“Uncle David made a funny!” Ohhh crap. I forgot that both my nieces were at the table.
“What did you do?!” Ohhh good. Now my parents want to know what is going on.
* * *
Two hours passed. No one ate. Food got cold.
I sat out in the living room with my parents. This wasn’t my first choice. But my sister, brother-in-law and the young one were in my room. Aside from the occasional sobbing along with comforting voices I could hear through the wall, there was not a whole lot of sound coming out of the living room. The older one was keeping her busy playing a Zelda game on her Game Boy. My parents and I were watching Tommy Boy…
