Turkey Shoot

Thanksgiving is a great holiday. After a morning of inane Macy’s Parade coverage merging into afternoon football games of questionable interest, we all sit down to a table overflowing with great food that I didn’t have to cook.
When I lived alone, I always had the philosophy that food should never take longer to cook than it does to eat it. This is why I stayed skinny back then, and probably why I’ve had health problems in the past. The last ten years have changed that somewhat. I now think, if Mark hasn’t been in the kitchen cooking for the last hour, dinner will probably suck.
Thanksgiving around here is much like it was when I was a kid. My mom would get up at four a.m. to start the turkey. That was because she had to cook a fifty pound turkey to feed about a hundred of her children, relatives, and friends. Mark starts his turkey at eight in the morning and continues cooking all day. He doesn’t get stressed because he started the process of Thanksgiving dinner the day before and many of the dishes are already done. Still he is in the kitchen for most of the day preparing more stuff to eat, and believe it or not he is happy to be there. I of course am happy he’s in there, because I’m sitting in the living room dozing off while watching football and not being bothered by Mark.
One thing about Mark, is that he loves to feed people. Unfortunately, he loves to feed our dog Molly too. What Mark doesn’t understand is that a dog will keep eating turkey until it explodes. A few years ago, while I was at work, Mark decided that Molly was a better garbage disposal than the actual garbage can. After four days of eating leftover turkey, he took the carcass and stripped it of all edible meat. Then he gave all that meat to Molly, who Mark says really wanted it. Molly has a brain about the size of a walnut, and most of that is used up as the senses of taste and smell. A few hours after Molly’s turkey banquet, she gave Mark back the gift that kept on giving, diarrhea. Diarrhea so bad that she couldn’t get to the door and convince Mark to let her out in time. Like an out of control fire hose, she let loose, covering parts of the living room and kitchen. Mark has a weak stomach, so his solution to the mess he now had to deal with, was to leave the house. Leave it until I came home from work and cleaned it up.
I’m glad that it didn’t actually happen on Thanksgiving day, because the smell and mess that I encountered upon entering the house would then always be linked with the holiday. Like the smell of pine always reminds me of Christmas, I’d always think of Thanksgiving while picking up Molly’s poop from a neighbors front yard.