Nov 22 2007
Happy Thanksgiving
In preparation for last year’s Thanksgiving dinner, I made a short sojourn to the local supermarket. It was late morning and I was only a cup of coffee old. I knew I should have bought the groceries the night before, but the holiday crept up from behind me like a patient cat stalking its prey. One minute nothing was happening, the next minute BANG!, it’s right on top of you.
When I got there, I didn’t know whether the store was open or not. Back in Houston when I was younger, it was understood by all parties: You don’t leave the house on Thanksgiving. This wasn’t out of some stricture by my family— such as the notorious “Be home by midnight or else” or “Eat your vegetables”— Nope. It was because nothing was open for business except maybe the Denny’s down the road and the movie theaters.
Everything else was shut down for the day. Do not disturb. Kaput.
Well, times have changed. I pulled up to the parking lot and a full-blown pandemonium was underway. Strewn carts, floating listless plastic bags, screaming mothers and children, the works. It’s like people were preparing for a disaster I that had otherwise been unaware.
I tried to slink around quietly, unnoticed. I was going to grab my cooking supplies and make like a tree and book it.
I nabbed an available grocery cart and strolled down the aisle to the meat section. I tried to smile nonchalantly, trying to exude a smiling calm as the people around me played bumper car with their carts. But no matter. The turkey was my goal and I had hours to kill before actually roasting the turkey. I could afford to take my time.
On my shopping list, after the turkey came its container. I had to roast it in something, right? I settled on one of those tin foiled roasters with aluminum side handles. Great, now I could get the hell out of there.
Then I had a wild, unexpected idea: Hey, maybe corn would taste good with the turkey.
The problem was there were roughly fifteen carts banging against each other from where I stood to the next aisle over where the cans of corn stood blissfully stacked and upright and gleaming on pristine supermarket shelves. Instant food.
Maybe, I thought, I could leave my cart here for a minute, swing my way over to the other aisle, grab a couple cans of corn and make a dash for the check-out lanes. Yeah, I thought, I think it’ll work.
The alternative would be to knock other carts around for a full thirty-cotton-pickin’-feet, conduct a few illegal shoulder-checks on unsuspecting shoppers, and then do it all again to reach the check out stands. I’m joking, of course, but the cart jostling was quite real.
Needless to say, I decided to leave my cart.
Without my brown grocery cart, my agility increased tenfold. I dodged, weaved, and cut through the crowd like a hot knife through butter. Nothing to it. The corn was in my possession in a matter of minutes.
I came back and stood where my cart once stood completely thunderstruck. Someone stole my cart!. I couldn’t believe it. I’ve never been cart-jacked before.
And there, neatly tucked away on the packaged food shelf laid my turkey and aluminum container with their specially designed aluminum handles. Well, at least he was kind enough to leave my turkey.
I eventually came home intact and Thanksgiving dinner, despite all, was a smashing success.
This year, I was determined not to be caught in the maelstrom again. I bought my turkey in advance. I got my aluminum roaster container not one but TWO days in advance. Yet even with these minor triumphs, I completely forgot the corn and the much planned mash potatoes and stuffing. You can remember massive amounts of data, but sometimes it’s that 5% remaining that’s going to be on the test.
The surprise was that the store was calm this year, almost sedate. No long lines. No wild-eyed mothers ramming their carts into each other to get that extra box of stuffing.
In fact, my turkey is comfortably roasting in the oven as I type this and I hardly raised a sweat.
As much of the preparations for Thanksgiving dinner is done, I’m sitting here thinking back of that last Thanksgiving with the madness at the supermarket. I marvel that we have so much and a world that has so little.
We walk into our grocery stores with sparkling white tiled floors and immaculately arranged rows of food and we don’t fully understand just how extraordinary a blessing this is. We even have a couple rows with medicine that take away our physical pain.
No other age of Man has had as much as us. Indeed, any other age would see our and mistake it for Paradise on earth. Flying machines, cars, magic pills that take th pain away…
I chose the picture at the top of this post because, like the Pilgrims and our Fathers before us, let us give thanks to God this Thanksgiving for blessing us and our nation with such abundance.