My son has developed an unhealthy obsession with turkeys, it seems; I find it hard to focus on anything else. He is singing turkey songs (that’s a plural), and yells “Thanksgiving!” every time a holiday-themed commercial flies by (Note to self, watch less Television). He’s drawing pictures of turkeys, gobbles like a turkey, and tells me stories about actual turkeys that are about to be slaughtered and eaten. I don’t know what they are teaching him at school; it seems as if they haven’t talked about anything else over the past month.
“What do the kids want to eat for Thanksgiving?” My husband asks. His mother wants to know, since we’ll be visiting her very un-kosher house this week.
“Your son wants a turkey,” I tell him.
He laughs at that; he thinks I am joking. Later that same day, I overhear him asking Mendel exactly the same question, getting the predicted answer.
“So, shall I buy a kosher turkey?” he asks me the next day.
“No. You take it to your mother’s house, and it instantly becomes a non-kosher turkey. Why bother?”
I think the case is closed, but no. He asks me again the day after.
“Turkey, turkey!” My son yells; I am unsure at this point why this has become such an issue. Does he feel left out? We never eat meat; why this sudden morbid fascination with dead birds?
Finally, I decide to cave in. Mendel wants me to cook the turkey. “Or dad,” he adds quickly, just because he doesn’t want to exclude his father from this monumental event. As if. My husband cooking an entire turkey: that’ll be the day. No, this will be on me; I’ll have to cook it and subsequently schlep it in the car for a three-hour road trip.
“Fine, buy a turkey,” I tell my husband. “But you better make sure it looks like a large chicken, and I need a foil pan and a turkey baster. And a bunch of other stuff. Also, that means I. Am. Not. Making. Pie.” (I have to draw the line somewhere).
So there it is. Three days before Thanksgiving, and I thought all I had to do was pack and lock the doors. Suddenly, I have a job to do: an important job, and I better do it right, or I will go down in history as the woman who can’t cook a proper turkey. I wonder, since this is such a mega-cultural thing, will they revoke my green card if I mess up? I guess it’s time to look for some recipes, maybe call some friends. I feel like I’m getting ready for battle: me in one corner; a naked, dead bird representing hundreds of years of American holiday tradition in the other.
To be continued, I’m sure…
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