MindSpinner

There isn’t a turkey. The dogs, the cat, and I don’t need it, and the rabbit says he’s a vegetarian, but do I have a carrot? (I haven’t introduced the rabbit yet - I must get around to that.) The turkey eaters are eating turkey with the other side of the family, and I’m trying to put together a Black and Decker workbench, you know, for when I want to build things and need to clamp them to do it. Trouble is, I can’t build the workbench. Step 12 is not happening. I swear I did steps 1-11 correctly, just according to diagram and directions, but Step 12 is where I’ve been stalled for the past hour. I’m supposed to bolt two wood pieces to two plastic pices that fit to the frame, and the holes I’m supposed to put the bolts through are an inch farther apart in the wood than are the corresponding holes in the frame. If you read the last two sentences over and over in an endless loop, you will get a sense of my thought processes over the last hour. All you need to add to your picture are diagrams too small to see clearly and “guy” directions, the kind that assume you already know what you are doing and kinda sorta have an idea how the result will function.

There isn’t a turkey. There are Cornish hens instead, still thawing in the fridge for tomorrow, when the kids and I will pretend it’s Thanksgiving Day all over again. I try to unhook my thinking from the calendar and all those memories of parades, gathered family and my mother’s cornbread stuffing, for which there is no recipe.

Yesterday I picked Catapult Kid up from the Academy. He walks about the house, and I drink in his features and his movements, quaffing his presence here the better to face another drought. He is 17 years, 10 months and 2 days old. He says he’d like to go ahead and enlist in the army come his 18th birthday, serve first, and then go to college. Read that over again slowly.

There is, in fact, more trouble afoot than that, and this just as near, but it will be the first of the year before its precise nature can be known and named.

Just now, Cornish hens, stuffing, cranberry salad, sweet potato muffins, green beans and pumpkin pie seem some tattered little army deployed against what tomorrows may bring.

For now, I’ll just be thankful that today is today and none of those worrisome tomorrows have come yet.