Thanksgiving in June

Four winged creatures you never want to Flirt with? A Turkey, a Goose, an Eagle, or an Ostrich. I've watched some pretty tough men try and get the snot knocked out of them. (nor would I mess with the cousins of the Ostrich, the Emu, the Rhea or the Cassowary. If you want to tame your Pit Bull, place him in a ring with a Cassowary.)

Real Moods? Memorious, nostalgic, patriotic, thankful.

Three things happened to inspire today's entry. One, Peggy thought my first BLOG entry was about some fish we used to have as pets. Two, thinking about the fish,  I remembered the fish story was part of an earlier journal I'd started before this one. Three,  I was looking at  one of the Spider plants in the house and remembered the fish tank that used to be there. So what the heck? Let's ressurect the entry of Thanksgiving day, 2004.

November 25, 2004

   Thanksgiving.  Our normal ritual on this last Thursday in November is to look around, watch families stress over the preparation of a feast that requires a month of fasting and six months with a personal trainer to recover from.  With no really close family in town, we go out.   This year we invited our friend Cheri.

   It was my fear that my journal would be reduced to a light hearted description of the fare we would ingest.  In short, I feared ennui, both mine and yours.

   My bride Peggy altered that reality.  She had determined the first part of our day would include the scouring of the fish tank.  It had been looking a little cloudy, maybe a lot cloudy.  Well we brought in all the cleaning accoutrements from the garage. The normal routine for this operation is to draw water down, change or clean the filter, wash the growth off glass, suck some of the gunk out of the pebbles.  Peggy had a bigger vision.  We would take the fish out of the tank, put them in a bucket, take the tank outside, wash the pebbles out with a hose, scrub everything down, and then put everything back together like new.  Peggy lithely fashioned a net out of things around the garage, pulled the fish from their environment, and we went to work.  Right away we noticed that one of the bigger fish was bent in the middle.  Really odd shape.  We decided to speed up the cleaning process hoping to save the poor guy.  Within just a few minutes he was a goner.  We are working as fast as we can, but Peggy looks down and two more are swimming sideways, and then upside down.   We work even faster.  We see them wiggle a little, quickly put them back into their known quarters, one floats to the top, one turns upside down.  I’ll tell you that net came in handy.  Now we are down to just one fish left.  For a few minutes he darted around really healthy like.  I mean he was home, it was clean, the filter was cleaned out, and the chlorination had been adjusted.  Still he must have been lonely.  He tipped to his side, rolled over; nose dove, and then seemed to have lost all sense of direction and gave up the ghost.  Peggy felt horrible guilt.

 

 I can be a compassionate guy.  All forms of life intrigue me, but somehow I can rationalize the great fish massacre of Thanksgiving 2004. They were my fish, a gift.  I fed them, I looked at them, and I watched them pick out their pecking order, their duties.  Still, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get close to them.They had no names. Don’t know if I’ll try it again.  But I am going to keep the tank. It looks really cool clean.  It can be a conversation piece as guests desperately look for inhabitants.  I may just create some in my mind to keep the hunt alive.   

  Somewhere in here we watched Indianapolis immasculate Detroit on Detroit's home turf. That Manning kid, what a showboat.

      Okay, to dinner.  At Cheri’s request we do Le Central, affordable French Turkey. They do do a nice job.  And Crème Brule rivals pumpkin pie as the pies de resistance.

       Our wine waiter, and our waitress, both from France are wrestling with the English language. But since the fare was Turkey, and the meal was  prix fix,  there didn’t need to be a whole lot of intelligent exchange.   We did throw the waitress a curve asking her to translate Pepe Le Pues’ common phrase, “Sacra Bleu.”  Turns out our guess was as good as hers. Two glasses of wine, 10 pounds of Faux French food (only because it was thanksgiving), and Crème Brule causes one to pose such deep queries.

 

Epilogue: Cheri has since gotten married and moved to Ireland where no one speaks french. And let's see, Ostrich, Cartoon Skunk, Wine, Spider Plant, Fish, Creme Brule, Thanksgiving, June 28th? There must be a connection  here somewhere.