Thanksgiving ought to be a pretty easy day to celebrate. You eat too much, watch football, eat too much again, go to bed and eat leftovers for a week.
But the Gunch family always does things weird. Like the time we had Thanksgiving dinner at my sister-in-law Gloriosa’s, and her mother-in-law ate the potpourri by mistake and had to be rushed to the hospital.
This year turns out to be just as weird.
Gloriosa raises backyard chickens, supposedly so she knows where every egg her family eats is coming from. It’s coming from the hoohah of one of her own chickens. I don’t know why this is preferable to the hoohah of a chicken she is not personally acquainted with, but she acts like it’s important.
Turns out, she didn’t know these chickens as well as she thought she did. A couple weeks ago, she discovered why her favorite hen, Henny Penny, had not laid no eggs yet. Right at dawn, Gloriosa and her husband woke up to “Cock-a-doodle-do!” just outside their window. It was Henny.
Well, Henny’s pronouns had to be changed. They also changed her name to Foghorn.
Unfortunately, Gloriosa’s neighbors have no love for a chicken which crows at sunrise, or any other time. Even her mother-in-law, who lives next door — she’s the one survived the potpourri — starts muttering about getting a B.B. gun.
Gloriosa posts about the problem on Facebook— and would you believe, one of her Facebook friends lives out in the country and WANTS a rooster. This lady don’t raise chickens for the eggs — she raises them to have baby chicks to sell, and her poor old rooster has wore himself out. She needs a rooster with a little spring in his step. And elsewhere.
Gloriosa is sure Foghorn will not let these mama hens down. Happy ending.
But then Gloriosa’s son Rex tells Toni (his girlfriend) about Foghorn. She snickers. “They gave you the old ‘going to live happily with a kindly farmer’ story, did they? Hah! That rooster is going to be somebody’s Thanksgiving dinner.”
Well, Rex passes this story on to his little sisters. They talk together and come up with the idea that their mama might have given Foghorn to their grandma Ms. Larda. They’ll pretend he’s a turkey and serve him for Thanksgiving dinner.
We all having Thanksgiving at Ms. Larda’s now — even though she’s got a shotgun house and we have to set up five of them long white plastic tables through doorways stretching from the kitchen through the bedroom, and winding up in the living room.
Gloriosa’s house is bigger and it’s more comfortable to eat there, but whenever we do, her mother-in-law comes and something always happens—like the potpourri incident .
We decide we are better off crowding into Ms. Larda’s house.
Anyway, the kids tell their mama they suspect we’ll be eating Foghorn. And they ain’t sure whether to believe her when she says, “Of course not!” So on their way to Ms. Larda’s, they take a detour to this chicken-raising lady’s house to see Foghorn in person. He is busy. Very busy.
The kids are relieved, but they still don’t want to eat no turkey, because it looks like Foghorn. Gloriosa argues a while, and then she calls up Ms. Larda and asks if it will be too insulting if she goes to McDonald’s and picks up hamburgers for them. The kids can eat far down at the end of the last table, so they won’t even see the turkey.
Ms. Larda heaves a big sigh. Then she says, “Can you pick up hamburgers for all of us?”
Turns out she made oyster dressing and put it in the turkey to bake, and a couple of the oysters were bad, and they contaminated the whole thing — both the turkey and the dressing. “It’s awful,” Ms. Larda says. “I shoulda known better. Never eat oysters in a month with ‘r’.”
So we all eat Ms. Larda’s mashed potatoes and butter and green bean casserole and pumpkin soufflé and three kinds of pie with hamburgers.
And it’s not bad. Weird, of course, but not bad.
