This year’s Thanksgiving has finally drifted away. Usually, even now, we would have had enough of turkey to last us through next spring, but this year was a little different. Instead of spending Thanksgiving huddled around the oven in Amarillo, we headed to Dallas, home of traffic and Suzanne’s brother Bob and his wife Tara who had volunteered, no doubt against a physician's advice, to host the meal this year.
A small word about Bob and Tara, who are extremely nice and generous people. The three of us all attended the same university: Texas A&M in College Station, Texas. Bob and Tara represent alumni that A&M is proud to call its own - they’re Aggies through and through. They go to football games and have items at their house that are maroon-colored. I, on the other hand, had worked on the student newspaper, making me an object of suspicion and derision.
Here is how my A&M slacker ways were revealed a few weeks ago. This at the end of Megan’s violin recital. A woman rushed up to me right as we were leaving:
Woman: “I hear you went to A&M!”
Me: “Yup.”
Woman: “I’m class of ‘84!”
Me: “Nice to meetcha.”
Woman: “Wouldn’t it be great if the Ags beat t.u. over Thanksgiving?” (t.u. is the University of Texas. I am compelled to write this in small letters for fear of maroon retribution.)
Me: “Ok.”
Woman: “That would be great bull, wouldn’t it!”
(Another woman then walks up.)
Woman 2: “Oh, Mark doesn’t pay attention to football. He says he liked football games in College Station because that’s when the library was very quiet.” (This is, I admit, one of my favorite jokes.)
Woman 1 (to me): “So you’re a two-percenter.”
Me: “That I am. But if you take my brother-in-law Bob who is a 200-percenter, add his wife Tara who is another 200-percenter, and average us all together, I come out okay.”
Now what this really means is when we were trying to find Bob and Tara’s house, all we had to do was look for the Texas A&M flag hanging from the front door and the sign in the middle of the front yard, and we knew we were in the right place.
But enough of that. Back to Thanksgiving.
It was nice to see everyone, and except for an anger management class involving the game Scene It and a throw pillow, it was a great holiday. On Wednesday night we had a magnificent game of Kings and Bartenders. This is a fun card game, even for the kids. Here are the rules: everyone sits around a table with a stack of quarters (we usually play with four quarters for each person). The dealer deals one face down card to each person. Everyone peeks at their card. The person next to the dealer then decides whether to keep his card or pass it to the next player (the object being to get rid of high cards). If the person decides to pass his card, the person next to him has to swap cards unless that person has a king. A king means you cannot trade and the first person is stuck with whatever card he was dealt.
This goes on around the entire table until the exchange gets back to the dealer who can either keep the card she has or pull a brand new one from the top of the deck. After that, all the cards are revealed, and whoever has the highest value card has to throw a quarter in the pot. When you’ve run out of quarters, you’re out of the game (and, supposedly, you have to get drinks for everyone else around the table - that's the bartender part). The last player with any quarters left wins and takes all the other quarters in the pot for an evening’s worth of Galaga fun at the arcade.
Needless to say Colleen and her cousin Andrew, working as a team, won the game. It was a dramatic ending - Colleen and Andrew versus their Uncle Jim. Each had one quarter left, and it was the last deal of the game. Colleen and Andrew decided not to pass their card. Jim decided not to exchange his card for the card on the top of the deck. When they revealed their cards, Colleen and Andrew had a six of spades. Jim had a six of hearts (or something like that). Cheers went up around the table because Colleen and Andrew had won (although at first they thought they had lost and were confused, but a second later their eyes grew wide and they started giggling madly), and then Colleen said loudly, “I love this game when it’s not my money and I win!”
Now I fear I have set our 10-year-old down the path of Vegas-style easy-winnings, cheap prime rib, and Elvis impersonators.
On Thanksgiving Day proper Bob cooked up a few fried turkeys (this involves a large fryer, propane and propane accessories, gallons of peanut oil, and a close eye on kids who gravitate toward any sources of combustion). I have never made a fried turkey because I am a chicken, but I now understand the allure of dumping vats of boiling oil on armies that put castles under siege. Boiling oil pops and spurts and, generally, looks dastardly. It also cooks up some dandy tasting turkey.
A full meal and several pies later, and with tryptophan hypnosis setting in (although I’ve read that this really isn’t true), we were done for the night. We drove back to Bob and Tara’s (dinner was at Suzanne uncle’s and aunt’s house) and, like the night before, banished all the kids to a tent in the backyard. The tent was my brother-in-law Mark’s idea, and I have to say it was utterly, absolutely brilliant. The combined force of our six kids had enough destructive power to rival the meteor comet that destroyed the dinosaurs, but that was all channeled into a peaceful huddled mass under the tent’s roof, sheltering the adults from the slings and arrows of unfair fortune that the kids would inflict upon themselves.
The day after Thanksgiving was a big football day. This is when Texas A&M plays the University of Texas. It’s all very exciting, what with the tension and the passion and the drama. So I went to the park with the kids, Suzanne, and my sister-in-law Karen.
We tried to play Lava Monster Baby 1-2-3, but the kids wanted to add their own rules this time, so the game devolved into something that required a lot of crying, feet stamping, and pouting. Part of the kid contingent for this outing was our other nephew, Scott who decided to goof around with us for a bit. I was happy about that because Scott is one interesting little dude. I enjoy talking to him, mainly because you never know what he’s going to say. This time he came up to me in the middle of the game and said, “Uncle Just Mark, I gave Colleen a hint about where the Baby is. I said, ’Over here ‘tis.’ That’s code, you know. You have to say it backward. If you do, you’ll get ‘tis over here.’ Get it?”
I liked that secret code, I used it yesterday in a board meeting. Someone asked where the agenda copies were and I glanced at the stack next to me and said, “Over here ’tis.” Then I nodded, knowingly and wisely, as if I expected everyone else to be in on the secret.
As with all things, the holiday came to an abrupt halt Friday afternoon as we swung by Half Price Books where the kids found many interesting books for the trip back to Amarillo. After that, in the parking lot, the kids said goodbye to their cousins and we hit the road, abruptly making several wrong turns and ending up in a miasma of non-moving Dallas traffic for what seemed to be twelve hours.
That’s the nice thing about the Texas Panhandle. There are big pickup trucks here - the kind with double-tires on the back wheels - and a lot of wind, but it’s seldom that you get stuck for anyplace too long. (Unless you’re stuck in snow. That’s why, during winter, the weatherman always reminds us to carry around peanut butter and kitty litter. I assume that when you’re stuck, you eat the peanut butter and use the kitty litter for traction to get out of the snowdrift.) So maybe, when we’re thinking about what we’re thankful for, we can add no traffic jams and brothers-in-law who are brave enough to dunk a turkey in boiling oil.
That, and speaking in backward code. That’s always a good one too.
