"Thanksgiving Day 2019" by Richard F. Yates

[Reeeeaally bad digital drawing made with MS Paint. It's so bad it makes me laugh! 2019.]

Weirdos will be descending upon us in just a few hours---and we can't stop them...because they're all RELATED to us! In fact, our older daughter, Frankie, her husband, Alec, and their baby, Felicity, are already here (and they brought their Switch and hooked it up to the t.v., and they're currently playing the new Luigi's Mansion game. It looks more like a cartoon than a video game to me---having grown up in the Asteroids, Space Invaders, Donkey Kong era... Wait. I might have digressed...)

So folks will start trickling in soon, and we're supposed to eat at 1:00 P.M. (Pacific Daylight Savings Time.) Because we're not eating mammals anymore, we did not make a ham this year, but because we are more okay with eating dinosaurs, which we believe would have no trouble eating us, if they had the ability---my family had chickens when I was a youngster, and those suckers didn't mind eating EACH OTHER! We watched on more than one occasion as a gang of fowls attempted to peck one of their fellow chickens to death...Birds can be vicious---and so we made a turkey. (Two turkeys, actually.) They are, in all respects, little monsters, so we still eat chickens and turkeys. We ain't telling anyone else that they have to be like us, but Mariah and I, ourselves, just don't like the idea of eating cows or pigs or sheep anymore. It's too sad. (We've projected human like emotions onto these types of animals---it's called anthropomorphism---and it's now infected our brains to the point that it's changed our behavior. Ce la vie!)

Besides turkey, which Mariah has been cooking since about 8:00 A.M. in a roaster oven, and a second turkey in the normal oven, she also made sweet potatoes in the crock pot (they've been simmering since last night!), and pies (pecan, cinnamon crumble apple, pumpkin), and a cheesecake, and she's in the process of making stuffing and cranberry sauce and rolls and cut up fruit and a GIGANTIC pot of mashed potatoes. (My wife tends to go overboard. I'm not sure if other folks are bringing OTHER dishes, but we'll have leftovers for a WEEK just on the stuff she's contributing.)

Folks usually start to show up early, and we'll eat for a long time, and either put some show on the t.v. or somebody will play a video game, and we'll all chat and laugh and talk about weird things that have happened over the years, until eventually people will have other feasts to attend and start slipping away, one or two at a time. By about 7:00 P.M., it will be just me and Mariah (and maybe Ellie, unless she heads back over to her new house to work on more painting,) sitting on the couch thinking about how well the day went. MOST of our family get-togethers end on happy terms, lately, but that hasn't ALWAYS been the case. There will be some wine and booze at this shindig, and with the DRINK comes the possibility for drama (we're mostly of Irish heritage)---but most of the time, stuff goes smoothly.

And I think these types of events are important. Whatever you think about your family, they are often the best source you have for memories---as in most cases, these will be the people who you spent your young lives with, and they're going to be your best chance of recapturing memories of the early events you experienced. They will remember stuff about YOUR life that even YOU don't! These are the people who are going to be most familiar with you and what you've lived through. If you're LUCKY (and our family tends to be fairly lucky), you've stayed connected---and these mutual experiences, even if they're just sharing turkey and mashed potatoes while some silly movie plays on the t.v., they still help build and maintain those "family" bonds.

Today, we'll have MY grandma here, as well as my granddaughter! That's a great-great hanging with the new kid. I wish my mom and dad we're still around to meet her, but things didn't work out that way! Life isn't always easy, but if we have these strong bonds to lean on, whether with a spouse or family or friends or co-workers, SOMEONE we can share with---REAL-WORLD, SOCIAL CONNECTIONS---they make the fun stuff more fun and the horrible stuff more tolerable.

And that's my take on Thanksgiving. Let me know what yours is!

---Richard F. Yates
(Primitive Thoughtician and Holy Fool)

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