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.