You want white meat? Have we got white meat!
Kate Harrigan
Does anyone out there have any even remotely Rockwellian memories of Thanksgiving? Grandmothers, aunts and uncles sipping eggnog around a crackling fire, perhaps, or sitting around the dining room table making appreciative noises while Dad carves the bird?
No? Not surprising. I don’t know of a single family that doesn’t nearly collapse under the weight of its own dysfunction every time this desperately warm and familial holiday rolls around.Mine was no exception.On good years, the table would erupt in furious argument, usually over religion, and usually provoked by my father making some deliberately sacrilegious statement to my uncle, the Jesuit priest.Bad years were marked by disaster – the Siamese cats sitting on the counter munching on the turkey as it cooled, or a dog taking a chunk out of my father’s hand in the middle of dinner.“You really shouldn’t feed him under the table,” My mother told him. “He becomes overly excited, especially when he smells turkey.” And then there was the bizarre, such as the time (before my time) when some prankster delivered a live turkey to my grandfather’s house Thanksgiving morning. Apparently Granddad had been complaining about how difficult it was to get a good, fresh bird. According to family legend, my grandfather opened the box to get a better look at the thing, and it tore off through the streets of West Roxbury with my grandfather in pursuit.And then there was the time my father decided to paint the kitchen.For months, my mother had been bugging Dad to do something about the kitchen, so finally Dad decided to get the job done. He did have the day off, after all. My mother suggested that Thanksgiving Day was perhaps not the ideal time for him to tackle the job, but he swore it wouldn’t take him long, and he’d work around the womenfolk who were fussing over the bird and chopping vegetables and so on. Anyway, Dad had the paint and the brushes and he wasn’t going to be stopped, so Mom did her best to adjust everyone’s schedule and make way for my father’s project.Dad was famously unhandy. People used to get far, far away when he decided to do anything that even remotely involved working with his hands. He’d done his share of painting, of course, and always said the worst part of the job was stirring that heavy old oil-based paint. But this time he had that problem licked.Wandering around the hardware store (my father wandering around a hardware store was a bit like the Unabomber wandering around a fireworks factory, but never mind), he'd found this nifty, automatic paint-stirring gadget that attached to an electric drill. I’ve always suspected the real reason he was painting the kitchen that Thanksgiving, after putting the job off for months, was that he couldn’t wait until the weekend to try out his new gadget. So there we all were Turkeyday morning. Aunts and grandmothers stood in the dining room doorway, balancing bowls of stuffing on their hips and wondering if it would be safe to make a dash to the refrigerator for a stick of butter.Dad set up shop. Preparations consisted of plunking the bucket of paint down in the middle of the floor and prying off the lid. No drop cloth. My father held drop cloths in the same disdain the Flying Walenda’s reserved for a safety net. No painter worth his salt needed a drop cloth, he’d say.Dad also didn’t read directions. Ever. Anything so poorly designed that one couldn’t intuitively figure out how to use it deserved to be returned to the hardware store, screwed up beyond recognition.And so Dad never got to read the sentence in the directions that said to leave the lid on the bucket of paint and punch the nifty gadget through the lid. Dad plunged the gadget deep into the wide open bucket of thick, white paint, sat back on his heels and hit the power switch.Great, oily waves of paint washed around the room, getting the kitchen table and refrigerator on one pass, a couple of aunts and even a patch of wall on another. By the time Dad got back on his feet and turned the thing off, most everything in the room, including the turkey, was swathed in white.Horrified silence.Dad took a moment to survey the disaster and then picked up the roll of paper towels.“For once, we’ll have enough white meat,” he said.So for those with families that manage to pull off joyous annual family gatherings, I wish you a perfectly browned turkey.I’d suggest the rest of you busy yourselves with something that provides an escape from difficult relatives. Perhaps you can find a nice little home improvement project.Published in The Regional News
Nov. 19, 1998
