thanksgiving

Deer have beds?  Well I guess everybody has to sleep somewhere.  They aren't exactly herd animals like it seems their bigger forebears are, but they must get together sometimes so that the males can have those antler battles while the does look on coyly with their doe eyes.  Otherwise I imagine Mom and the kids and Pop nest separately.  I'm just speculating and at this point I could go to the wiki, but I guess I will let the deerslayer tell us himself. 

I don't know why Beagles didn't toss in a little fender bender, an angry confrontation gradually melting into a realization on both sides that they had both been a little in the wrong, a hearty handshake and proclamation of brotherhood and peace on earth to all men, oh and why not some drug dealers and a car chase, and since the border is not far away some of those cool mounties in their cool hats?  I did like the phrase winky-blinky and the image of that slow snake of cars  herky jerking their way down the dark highway ahead,.  I'll give him a B- for solid reportage, but a little imagination (the lost scarf alone, who hasn't lost a scarf, maybe a scarf knitted for him by his mama from rare fibers from his homeland, now occupied by an implacable foe against whom he has vowed revenge?) would have gotten him into A territory   See it's not that hard.

Thanksgiving was a big day when I was a kid.  My mother's parents lived just down the street so they would come by and with the folks and three kids it was a pretty full table in the dining room of the bungalow.  Mogen David wine was passed around and even us kiddies got a dollop.  This was the good stuff, nice and sweet, not like that awful bitter and sour stuff that those Frenchies drank.  Mogen David would make a later appearance in my life as Mad Dog 2020, but that is another story.

I never liked turkey, but there were plenty of other dishes.  Stuffing was good and stringbeans, and I liked the sweet potatoes with the melted marshmallows, mostly it was the marshmallows.  And pumpkin pie, I still love pumpkin pie.  My mother was like a traffic cop, making sure the dishes were going in the right direction, but kind of hurrying it so that you were still holding the mashed potatoes when the stringbean express was rushing in and you couldn't pass the mashed potatoes on because your sister was scooping the marshmallows off the sweet potatoes   Once the rush was done she patrolled the plates to make sure that everybody had some of everything.  Nerves got a bit frayed over the groaning table.

The best Thanksgivings though were years later with my beer drinking buddies in Champaign, somebody's cruddy apartment, some slapdash mess of food, and plenty of Falstaff beer.  Ah those were the days my friend.