What's that smell?

When turkeys go bad

Thanksgiving is the one holiday that seems to consistently have things go wrong for my family.  With the exception of a few Christmases, I’ve seen more Thanksgivings ruined than any other holiday...including Arbor Day.  The first one that stands out in my mind is one around the mid eighties or so when my mother managed to mostly remove the tip of her right finger with a can of green beans.  Mom went to the emergency room with my grandfather, the remains of her finger mummified in one of his under shirts.  She came home around nine that night with stitches and we had warmed-up, reconstituted Thanksgiving dinner which was on the whole, not very good.  This was also the Thanksgiving on which I learned that much as I was a tomboy and found scabs and scars cool, stitches were icky and I went to bed with my warmed-up, reconstituted dinner in the back of my throat after convincing my mom to show me the remains of the carnage.
The following year, we got the turkey in the oven just fine, but after about an hour’s worth of cooking we had a hearty chorus of family members saying, “What’s that smell?” and we discovered that our turkey was, in fact, bad.  I remember riding with my grandfather to every grocery store that was open looking for a suitable replacement turkey.  I was also a bit too young to grasp the concept of what a “bad” turkey was, and so assumed that my grandmother caught it in the oven swearing and smoking cigarettes, as this is what my conceptual idea of “bad” amounted to at the time. 
Several Thanksgivings then passed without incident, apart from my uncle traumatizing me with his fascinating trick of finding the turkey heart in the giblet bag and making it beat by blowing into it with a drinking straw.  Lots of people throw the word “trauma” around casually but that image is very clearly branded into my mind so I believe its use is justified.
Then when I was a senior in college my roommate and I had a very fancy idea of having a “dinner party” for Thanksgiving.  The turkey was in the oven for about an hour when once again, we had a chorus of “What’s that smell?” and I discovered that I was far better educated at turkey cooking than my roommate, who had left the bag of giblets inside the bird, which was now filled with plasticized burning turkey guts.
The first year I was married we invited both of our mothers over for Thanksgiving and I was exceedingly proud of how flawless the plan had gone.  We pulled the turkey out of the oven, carved it, and realized it wasn’t cooked.  Back into the oven it went for 30 minutes.  We tried again and discovered it was still not cooked.  The in and out of the oven bit went on till eight at night at which point we were all so ravenous we didn’t particularly care about salmonella and ate the darn thing anyway.
Our last true fiasco came when my grandmother bought us a roaster oven.  We (incorrectly) assumed we could put the turkey in a roasting BAG inside the roaster OVEN.  Makes sense right?  But after about an hour, we had yet another heavenly chorus of “What’s that smell?” and discovered the roasting bag had melted to the sides of the pan, and the turkey, and filled the entire house with a delightful aroma of burned plastic - the kind of smell you used to get when the film strips at school would get caught in the projector.
These cumulative events are why we’re taking our mothers to the Thanksgiving buffet at the casino this year.  And if anybody asks “What’s that smell?” I’ll tell them it’s overheating slot machine and to be quiet and finish their cranberries.

Pond of Death

I grew up in the Southwest.  It’s hot there - a good summer day is 113 degrees or so.  There’s not much in the way of greenery apart from trees that everybody’s allergic to and cactii that nobody wants to touch.  My idea of interacting with water was taking a shower.  This is partly due to the fact that we were in a state of perpetual drought and partly because I spectacularly failed at swimming lessons.  But that’s another story.

Yet another concept I failed at spectacularly.

My whole life I grew up thinking of water as a glamorous, unattainable thing.  And at some point during my childhood when my grandmother became addicted to Home and Garden TV I discovered that people had ponds in their back yards.  Not just the uber filthy rich - normal people like us.
I immediately decided we needed a pond in our back yard.  I could sit by it on lazy afternoons, maybe put some fish in it.  Maybe teach my dog to swim since I had failed.  The possibilities were endless.  I knew from science and school that if you dug deep enough in the ground you’d hit water.  So I took a shovel, went into the back yard and started digging.  This was a long and slow process because, as I’ve mentioned, it was probably close to 113 out.  But still no water.  I started to despair.  At some point my uncle came out and said, “Whatcha doing kiddo?  Digging to China?”
China?  No that couldn’t be right.  If you dug down into the ground far enough you hit water.  Not China.  I sat down dejected, convinced that Unknown Chinese People had already used up all the water in the spot that I was digging.  And then my grandpa told me to fill in the hole before our dog fell in it and broke her back (this same phrase, strangely enough, put an end to many of my childhood adventures and I lived in mortal terror of breaking our dog’s back.  Again, this is another story).
So we didn’t get a pond.  I still never learned to swim but I continued to admire water.  Then I got married.  And one summer my husband got an idea that we should each write down one thing we want to accomplish for the summer on a list on the refrigerator.  The kids wanted to go play mini-golf and go to the obscenely overpriced fun center.  My husband wanted to go to a baseball game.  I don’t know what sort of delusion possessed me as I stood in front of the refrigerator, pen in hand but I scribbled down “Build a pond”.
“Cool!” said the kids.  I think they were having similar visions I had as a child of lazing by the pond, only thankfully we didn’t have a dog they could teach to swim.  “Can we talk about this?” said the husband.  I think he was having visions of having his yard turned into an aquatic war-zone.
But I persisted.  I picked a spot under the flowering pear tree that looked pretty and idyllic and was currently full of ugly useless rocks.  I went to Home Depot and bought a pond liner, a pump, and a remarkably tacky plastic waterfall.  And we drove out into the mountains and got some large rocks that we had planned to use in the design.  And after a few hours of hard work, a good deal of complaining, and one more trip to Home Depot because I hadn’t worked out the power for the pump in my excitement, I had a pond.
I was in heaven...I had a wonderful aquatic thing all to myself.  It was my pond of wonder and amazement.  Then the algae started growing.  My pond of wonder was suddenly a pond of stinkiness and greenness.  I researched online and discovered that you could allegedly control algae by putting barley in your pond.  So I did - and my pond went from having algae in it to having algae in it that was participating in an extended hay ride.  So I decided to get tough.  I bought enough chemicals to give every pool in every Olympic village ever built a shock treatment.  The algae went away but standing too near the pond also produced a peculiar burning sensation in the eyes, nose, and every other sensitive orifice.
And for awhile everything was peaceful.  Until one day I went home and discovered a tarantula had drowned in my pond.  I was horrified, partly because I had never seen a tarantula this far into the city but mostly because it was in my pond.  I’m not terribly fond of spiders, so deciding what to do with the expired arachnid took some thought.  I certainly didn’t want to touch it.  So I took a shovel with a very long handle and gently scooped it up.  It may have been the wind or my imagination but at this point I think the tarantula twitched.  I shrieked (which I’m not prone to doing) and jerked the shovel and the tarantula carcass sailed over the back wall into the neighbor’s yard.  I silently prayed that my neighbor wouldn’t go into his yard any time soon and if he did that he’d be astounded by the prey that the extremely large crows were dragging in.
Then came another period of relative peace wherein my pond returned to being a beautiful, idyllic, chemical filled oasis.  Then the kamikaze lizards arrived.  We’d always had lizards in our yard, but never any with suicidal tendencies.  Yet every day for almost a month I would come home to find a drowned lizard in my pond.  I was much less squeamish about the lizards, so they would be scooped gently into Walmart bags and thrown away.  I wasn’t pleased and began to think of ways to deter the lizards from meeting a horrible, chemical filled demise.  Apart from posting very tiny “No Diving” signs I was stumped.  Then the coup de grace came.  I went out to scoop out the day’s lizard and found a dead bird in my pond.  I’m very fond of small animals.  The lizards were on the borderline of upsetting, but the finch was too much.  

I vaguely remember Eddie Izzard doing a bit about a “Pond of Death” in his discussion of British films and that was exactly what I had created.  A Pond of Death.  My beautiful idyllic liquid thing was now a mechanism for murdering the neighborhood animals.  The tarantula had been worrisome.  The lizards disconcerting.  But an adorable, fluffy (strikeout) feathery thing?  This was too much.  I think somewhere in my mind I expected to come home and find puppies or bunnies floating in it next, although that was highly improbable.  I believe at this point, I called my husband in tears because I was convinced I had become some sort of genocidal pond owning maniac.
That winter we drained the pond and dug it out.  When we dumped it over in the grass we found the body count not only amounted to what I had previously found, but countless lizards, unidentifiable bugs, and the largest and ugliest slug I had ever seen.  I apologized to my husband for the gaping hole in his otherwise pristine yard and resolved to reduce my home beautification projects to things that wouldn’t result in mass murder.

Disturbing and Disgusting

There...I wrote something.

People keep telling me to write something.  It started with my mom.  I wrote a pretty decent children’s book called “The King and the Oatmeal” when I was a kid - I never got it published mind you but it really was pretty good.  My mom still has it somewhere.  I think she’s keeping it in the hopes that one day I’ll win the Nobel Prize and she can then say she owns the sole copy of my first manuscript because those maternal bragging rights have some serious street cred.
Then in my freshman year of high school, we were supposed to write a continuation of Edgar Allan Poe’s “Cask of Amontillado” for Halloween.  My short story came back from the teacher with the following comment in red: “Macabre and disturbing.  And somewhat disgusting.  Have you ever considered a career in writing?  Watch your margins next time.”  I kept that paper because “disturbing” and “disgusting” felt like very fine bits of literary criticism and I was extremely proud of them.
College and grad school completely soured me on writing because that’s all I did.  Not of the disturbing and disgusting sort but of the boring academic sort.  Although I did slip in a nifty bit of prose about aliens attacking the Garden of Eden into an essay I did on “Paradise Lost” when I suspected my professor wasn’t reading our papers.  I got an A+ on it.
I wrote fanfiction for awhile.  Actually I wrote smut but I told polite geek society that it was just fanfiction.  It got great reviews and the words “disturbing and disgusting” were replaced with “filthy” and “hawt”  which again felt like very fine literary criticism for the niche I was catering to.
When I got married my husband suggested I should write a book about some of the events that shaped my life after he read a short story I had written that really could go back to the disturbing and disgusting label.  I started on it, and then had a nightmare that it was published and recommended for Oprah’s book club amid a series of libel lawsuits.  I stopped writing again.

Then I was looking at Despair.com for Christmas gifts to remind the people I work with just how under-appreciated and devalued we are, and I saw their poster for blogging.  “Never before have so many people with so little to say said so much to so few.”  I liked that.  And I decided if I couldn’t inflict my stories on the published world or even an eBook, that I could certainly make the Internet suffer.