Third Cousin, One's Removed.

Good Gobble, I love Turkey Day. 

If holidays were early 90s college basketball teams, Thanksgiving would be Michigan, and the Fab Five is turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy and pumpkin pie. And like Chris Webber, I’ll travel to have some.

It’s been a personally-revered event since my days as a lard lovin’ little chubbgoblin. The sage-speckled strata of salty goodness bewitched me at such a young age I would have surely chosen giblet gravy Pop Tarts over strawberry had they been available at the A & P. Each time I traced a turkey around my fleshy digits, I fantasized of the crayon becoming a fork, the drawing a drizzly butterball. 

Every year, my aunt held a feast. Cousins and friends and extended family crammed the house, all the delicious smells weaving with the comfortable aroma of my uncle’s pipe. I loved everyone one there.

Almost everyone, that is. I'll call him Jackie. I’m not sure if he was related to me or not—he was someone’s step-grandfather-in-law or something—all I know is that he was always there by the time we arrived. Jackie was older, his thinning hair and glasses giving his face a nondescript “old man of the 1960s” look. Every year, there he was, perched in a folding chair, leaning on his cane and clicking his dentures.

Jackie would wait until we’d been there a while. As soon as my parents weren’t around, he’d look me up and down and say something about my weight. Usually it was along the lines of “Looks like you’re a little on the fat side.”

In case you didn’t already know, I had a few insecurity issues as a kid—my teeth stuck out, I had black, horn-rimmed glasses, and yes, I was a little on the fat side. Even if he hadn’t pointed it out, I already felt like a dweeb, having been forced to dress up in my church clothes just to see a bunch of people I usually saw in my Sears Toughskins. It was as if he knew I was a sitting duck for his ridicule.

My feelings weren’t hurt as Jackie lampooned my girth year after year; it pissed me off. He didn’t exactly have the body of Wink Martindale, I figured, so he should just shut the hell up. 

But a couple of years later, the ground shifted a bit. I learned some information about Jackie from an intoxicated, yet apparently well-informed, family member:

He had no penis.

I’m not making this up. It was forty-five years ago, but it may has well have happened this morning, the words are so clear in my memory. Here are some of the thoughts and feelings I recall upon hearing this game-changer:

a) Totally not surprised—His pants always rode up over his gut, making the lower half a little snug. He didn’t sport even a slight bulge, his smooth groin mirroring Homer Simpson’s. I could only imagine that, without a twig, the berries simply sank back into the peat moss.

b) Grossed out—Oh, man, that must’ve hurt! What did they do with it?

c) Vengeful—I may be fat, Jackie, but I can always lose weight. Also, I have a penis.

d) Sad—I remember thinking, how much would it suck—sorry, bad choice of words—how much would it bite—sorry, my bad again. That must have been terrible.

I can’t remember if Jackie had already passed away before I’d learned of his dismembership from Klub Kilbasa. I know I was still quite young and my parents must have been shocked to observe my learning this classified data from the drunk relative. I never brought it up, so to speak, and neither did they.

So Jackie, all this time later, I forgive you for calling me fat every year at Thanksgiving. And wherever you are, I hope they let you have as many of those things as you want.

You deserve it.

You'll Feel Better About Yourself After You Read This.

Hang on a second. 

Sorry about that, had to loosen up the belt a little. 

Okay, what the hell, I took it all the way off—it's been that kind of a weekend. 

What's the deal with belts, anyway? Oh sure, the man cons you into believing a belt is a useful accessory for keeping the old trou from sagging, but I submit that it's nothing more than an oppressive device whose roots can be traced to medieval dungeons. The belt is nothing more than an iron man maiden designed to punish my marbled middle.

Women seemed to have gotten the message years ago, burning not only their brassieres, but other confining devices propagated by men to keep them constricted and tamed. Girdles, curlers, high heels—even tweezers were shit -canned by a group of people fed up with a system which promotes torture in the name of fashion.

And that's why I'm about to burn my belt. I'm fed up—literally—from Thanksgiving weekend. During the past five days, I have exhibited the type of behavior that makes Caligula look like an even skinnier version of that chick who's married to Harrison Ford.

Fortunately, I've discovered there's actually a name for this culinary debauchery; I looked it up and it's called the "Nagev" diet. I know, it's sounds sort of Russian, but the term actually is "vegan" spelled backwards. It involves consuming only the bodies and byproducts of organisms which once had a face. 

It all started because I prepared Thanksgiving this year. All of it. Came up with the menu, shopped for it and cooked it all up. Fat was the common denominator. Each dish—turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes—contained at least an entire stick of butter, except the pumpkin pie, which I'm pretty sure still contained more lard than Rush Limbaugh tucks south of the elastic. 

I must have subconsciously decided that dairy products would not only stave off blandness, they would also curb any food-born hazards which may lie in wait for my bride and daughters. Ever since the e-coli scare with the under-toasted Pop Tarts, I've been a smidge paranoid.

The day went well, thankfully. Everything tasted pretty darned good, and nary a family member succumbed to the charms of our bathroom's only pottery not holding candles.

Still, everything would have been fine had I decided to eat with abandon on Thursday only. But when I rolled out of bed Friday morning, I'd barely nodded good morning to my wife and planted my swollen feet on the cold floor before pie had made me its breakfast bitch. 

From that moment on, every meal was a mini Thanksgiving. I understand I've taken a bit of journalistic license with this blog, but here's an indisputable fact: Out of the next four meals I ate, four of them were turkey, stuffing and mashed potatoes. By Saturday night, I'd thrown back so much sodium that I dreamed of Popsicle forests with Diet Coke waterfalls. 

My fifty-one-year-old body, after layering on a sedentary weekend of football watching, pleaded with me to purge the gelatinous globs of gluttony from its distressed bloodstream. By Sunday night, it begged me, "Dude, go to the gym. Or go for a walk. Hell, just move your toes."

Maybe I'll hold off on burning my belt for now. After all, what are the alternatives? A loosely tied rope? Nah, only Ellie Mae can pull that off. 

Suspenders? Nope, even though some guys can definitely rock that look, 

I don't think I'm one of them.

I'll see how things feel after a couple of salads.

It's all about food...except when it's all about other food.

For most of us, yesterday had a singular focus—food—preparing it, eating a whole bunch of it, discreetly spitting an accidentally-eaten giblet into our napkin, packing it up, wiping bits of it off the counter and taking it home for later. During the other 364 non-Thanksgiving days, most people occupy themselves with other interests and pursuits.

Here's the thing, however: My family discusses food incessantly. Not just on Thanksgiving or Christmas or Easter or birthdays, but every single day, several times per day. Here's an example:

Fifteen-year-old Daughter, on cell phone: Hey Dad, can you come pick me up from basketball what's for dinner?

Me: Okay. I'll be there in ten minutes cheese quesadillas.

Yesterday, we drove to Auburn to have Thanksgiving dinner at my wife's mom's house. She makes a fantastic, traditional Turkey Day spread, and since Auburn is about forty-five minutes away, that was forty-three minutes for us to spend talking about food. The other two minutes were devoted to deciding how loud to play the radio. We'd barely driven five hundred yards, when the first culinary salvo was fired.

Ten-year-old daughter: Do you think grandma will have shrimp with cocktail sauce?

Me: Yes. She always does.

Ten-year-old daughter: What if she doesn't?

Me: I don't know, but I'd say that chances are greater than eighty percent that she will.

Ten-year-old daughter: Dad, I don't care about percentages. I just need to know if she's having shrimp with cocktail sauce, because I've eaten very, very little today.

Fifteen-year-old daughter: Dad, I don't ask for much (Buzzer which symbolizes gross untruth should sound here). I just ask for shrimp and cocktail sauce on Thanksgiving Day. Don't deny me that simple pleasure.

By the time we had arrived at Grandma's house, each kid had a glazed facial expression representing a singular desire. If Miley Cyrus, Justin Bieber and a platter of shrimp with cocktail sauce sat in the living room together, my daughters would have screamed, jumped up and down and hugged the prawns.

As my wife joined her mother in the kitchen to help with dinner, I sat and observed my two young lionesses. They sat on the couch, still wearing their coats, and attacked the appetizers.

Me: You guys, save some for the rest of us.

Ten-year-old daughter: How many?

Me: I don't know. A few.

Ten-year-old daughter: What, like two or three?

Me: No. More than that.

Ten-year-old daughter: How many?

It was futile; I was merely talking to the tops of their heads as they bowed to their plates. Time for a different tack.

Me: You guys, finish what's on your plate and stop. Otherwise, I won't share the turkey neck with you.

Fifteen-year-old daughter: Ewwww!

Ten-year-old daughter: Ewwww! Turkeys don't have necks.

Me: Of course they do. What do you think holds their heads to their bodies?

I'd already lost them. Again, all I could see were my children's light and dark brown head crowns. Their plates resembled miniature shrimp Jonestowns, tails strewn about in smears of cocktail sauce. The paper plates had already begun decomposing in their hands as my older daughter wiped her mouth and finally looked at me.

"That was so good when's dinner?"

Just cover it all with gravy.

Thanksgiving is a strange phenomenon. Oh, but I do enjoy it, a lot.

It's a secular, American (and Canadian) event, so it's a bit off the world's radar. It's all about food; no cards, no gifts, no putting your screaming two-year-old on the Turkey's lap for some keepsake photos.

In my opinion, Thanksgiving's featured brown food items are absolutely the finest combination of flavors to grace grandma's dusty china. Ever since my childhood, I've only swum in a sea of Thanksgiving brownness. Turkey? Of course. Mashed potatoes, gravy and stuffing? Another scoop, please. Green beans, cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes? No thanks, but I'll take a roll.

Of course, opting for these foods as a child validated the phrase, "You are what you eat." As I've mentioned in previous posts, I was a bit too short for my weight, and when it came to this particular holiday, I became a little self-conscious when convening with folks I only saw once a year. I'm sure many of us remember walking into a house full of friends and relatives, who would size us up the second they laid eyes on our one-year-older stature.

My family loyally attended the yearly feast at my Aunt Lilas' house. I loved entering her warm kitchen, the aromas of all the brown food sprinting to embrace my olfactory senses. There, waiting in the living room, were my cousins, aunts, uncles, and this guy who I'll call "Rusty." He was always the first to assess my corpulence, with such phrases as "I guess you're a little on the fat side, huh?"

Rusty really had no room to talk. He was one of those guys who had to make a decision about where his pants' waistline would fall.

He had to choose between:
1) Belted, above the stomach, with most of the belly encased within the trousers' crotch area, or
2) Belted, below the gut, thereby necessitating a smaller waist area, but with the entire stomach sagging over the pants, with the shirt straining to remain tucked in.
He chose option 1).

I tried not to let Rusty's comments hurt my feelings, and it certainly didn't curb my appetite for that awesome, brown, Thanksgiving fare, except for one year. My grandpa had just had a heart attack, so my aunt decided to provide a healthier spread. The brown stuff disappeared, except for the turkey and the pumpkin tartlettes. Yes, tartlettes. Not to look a gift horse in the mouth, but I celebrated silently the following year when the traditional stuff returned.

And the day would have been a lot less stressful had my sister and I not been required to say grace. I always knew it was coming, so after deflecting whatever comment Rusty had to serve up, I dreaded that the prayer would follow shortly thereafter. I'm sure Donny and Marie performed for their relatives all the time, but I would have preferred just telling everyone that my sister and I had already belted out, "God is great, Good is good..." on the way over in the car. In other words, we had pre-prayed.

Oh, well. Happy Thanksgiving, and embrace your inner brownness.