There was one crazy Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday that is not Christmas or Easter. This one will be especially good. It started yesterday and will end Thursday evening.

Yup, Sunday Pat and our son Teddy did the shopping for a Monday dinner with Teddy, his wife Sabrina and their babies, Ray and Toby. Farmers do make eight-pound turkeys.

Teddy, who works in Alaska's Prudhoe Bay, and Sabrina came down from Spokane because Pat will work on Thursday and be unable to prepare her scrumptious grandma-style Thanksgiving meal.

Pat's a shuttle driver for the casino at Toppenish, and casinos never close. Monday was her day off.

Because of his work, Teddy often misses family events. He missed our family Christmas last year. He made sure he had this Thanksgiving with mom and dad.

Today and tomorrow will be regular days. Then Thursday we'll re-start Thanksgiving. Pat and I will go to sister Teresa's house in Grandview, where most of her extended family will gather.

Teresa invites us every year so that we won't be alone. She makes a mean lemon merengue pie that nobody gets to touch until after I arrive.

Seems like a bit much, huh? It got me to thinking back to when Thanksgiving was simpler.

Like the time Pat arranged for a wild turkey. Her sister Rita and Rita's husband Dave were feeding some south of Granger in an area called Satus back around 1990.

Teddy was all excited the day before Thanksgiving as we drove to the execution. The turkey was not.

The turkey always came to Dave readily. Not this day. It seemed as if he knew. Maybe it was the axe in Dave's hand.

Dave finally caught the turkey but, still, there was trouble. The wild old Tom kept slipping its neck off the chopping block.

But in an instant, Dave made the perfect strike. Then reality set in for Teddy. He was not impressed by a dying turkey flopping all over the yard.

"That's what turkeys do," Dave said, trying to ease Teddy's trauma.

Next the slaughter crew dipped the scrawny carcass into boiling hot water to start the feather plucking. After a couple of hours, we calculated all the man-hours to that point - Mom, Dave, Teddy, me and I don't remember who else - and realized how efficient farmers can be.

It was so much work that we had to finish it at home, pulling the peskiest feathers with pliers. We were all sort of repulsed by the time we were done.

Teddy didn't eat any of the wild turkey. He couldn't after all that flopping. His sister Berney wouldn't touch it. It was all dark meat, not anything resembling turkey she eaten before.

"The one thing I do remember," she recalled, "is that the feet were out on the back patio for a long time. Teddy kept them!"

We all gathered at Terry's house with dad and my now-deceased older sister Della. Pat walked in proudly with her roasted wild turkey and then slipped away in hopes of an admiring reaction.

One by one, as they passed by the table, guests asked: "What's that?" And the looks on their faces did not indicate approval.

Just before we all sat down, Pat came out of her hiding place and answered:

"Okay, it's a Mexican turkey."

We all laughed and sat down to our wild turkey Thanksgiving.