"Abduct" and "Kidnap" are such harsh terms; we need a friendlier word that means something like "Aliens have accepted your mental invitation to pull you up thru the marvels of outer space."
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OK, I'll start the entry after I give you this Xmasween card for belated Turkey Day:
(The card has no inside or back; so there is no message other than an implied seasonal greeting from Xmasween.)
Dear diary,
Well that actually went fine. What was I so worried about! Yestereven we had our Ray Family Thankless Day Jamboree. Everyone was in a good mood, and the food was perfect, and we played a fun game. That is all.
It’s a lot easier to write a long, interesting entry if the get-together goes wrong, or if there are arguments or stress. But, since this second of the two family festivals that we attended was a success, there’s almost nothing to report; for I like to focus only on the negative aspects of life — keep my eyes on the prize.
I’ll try to recall the details of the evening anyway, just to have something to read about when I’m old and dead. What seems run-of-the-mill to me now might someday appear fantastic. I might say: “Wow, I can’t believe I was once alive, patrolling my local swamp in a flying boat and falling in love with enormous reptiles.”
So we arrived at my mom’s house at 4 p.m. sharp, or maybe seventeen minutes thereafter. My mom was there, and so were my sister and her beau: Susan and Erik are their names; and my mom’s name is Rita. My mom had cooked a turkey and made gravy and stuffing and a whole smorgasbord of other food. My sweetheart and I had just one job: to provide alcohol. So we walked into the house holding two grocery bags filled with spirits. My first job was to get the wine out and open it up; and my mom handed me a corkscrew that looked different from the one I’m used to using (we have a deluxe one at our house which is easy to use, but this tool that my mom handed me was more basic and thus it confused me); so I twisted the loopy part into the cork and started pulling, but I could tell that something wasn’t right, so I removed the tool and in the process slashed my finger and started bleeding; so I then asked my sister’s beau Erik if he knew how to operate this abomination, and he helped me out: he sprang the cork off the bottle with ease; and I immediately poured myself three drinks & drank them down, yum.
Then Susan asked if we saw our in-laws at all this holiday season, expecting us to answer “No,” because we usually never see them; but my sweetheart answered “Yes,” and I could tell that this shocked my sister Susan, so we hastened to explain to her all the mishaps that led to us attending Anti-thanksgiving with the enemy sect. If you’re interested, O my dearest diary, I already told you about that day in an earlier entry – you should listen when I’m speaking to you.
Anyway, so the Ray Fam evening started out on a good note, even tho I gashed my hand trying to open the wine bottle, for this gave me an excuse to down a whole cask of liquor straightaway; & also it was amusing to recount, to a captive audience, the woes of our travels.
The next thing that happened is the arrival of my brother and his wife: Paul and Colleen are their names. Then Colleen’s mom arrived; her name is Debbie. I should mention again, for those who are just tuning in to this post, and for anyone who has not read all of my previous entries here, that Paul & Colleen recently procreated a little baby boy, Frank Booth Ray, who accompanied his parents to this foreign celebration. He arrived reclining royally in a portable nest. I was worried that this newborn would commandeer the proceedings and whisk the family’s attention away like a vortex, but nothing bad happened along those lines: we all oohed and awed at the creature for a reasonable duration, but soon everyone returned to their normal adult concerns—raunchy jokes and high-stakes gambling—and only my mom obsessed over the babe for the remainder of the night. That was fine with all of us, because nobody really wanted to stand up and jostle him continuously (if this lad does not receive continual jostling, he’ll scream cock-a-doodle-doo).
The last time that I saw Paul and Colleen was a few weeks ago, right after their child was born. I asked them then if they feel like a mom and dad yet, and they said that the idea seemed foreign to them, as this is (to date) their first and only child. Now, upon seeing them this next time, this current time, which was the second time I had seen them since the bloody ordeal of live-birth, I asked them the question again (“Are you comfortable wearing the titles of ‘mom and dad’ yet?”); and I thought they’d say “Oh, yes, after the passage of these last few weeks, having endured the fire-baptism of parenting duties for what seems thousands of hours nonstop, we feel exactly like a mom and dad: those roles now fit us like a glove, specifically a semi-formal evening glove that reaches beyond the elbow,” — but, to my surprise, both of the new parents answered as one, immediately: “No, it feels weird to be called mom and dad.” And Colleen added, “I was talking to my own dad on the phone last night, and he referred to me as ‘mom’, and it felt really weird.”
(I’m warning you, I’m already running out of material to relay here; cuz, like I said, the evening went so well that… Ah, I just thot of the perfect saying for the present occasion: No news is good news.)
So then we all proceeded into the dining hall and took our places at the table. Should I list the full menu? I already told you some of the foods above, but now I’ll try to recall every last single item. Turkey, of course: both light and dark meat. Gravy, brownish in hue. Cranberry sauce, which stood out as a deep rich purple among the other dishes’ earth-tones. Mashed potatoes, golden white. Succulent amber stuffing, which consisted of breadcrumbs, celery, peppers, sage, giblets, dried apricots, and flaked almonds. (Stuffing serves the dual purpose of helping to keep the meat moist while also adding flavor to the bird it is stuffed in.) Steamed cauliflower, practically translucent. Cornbread, light yellow. Squash, orange. And lastly, green bean casserole, creamy and flavorful, topped with crispy french fried onions.
I can’t tell you what beverages everyone chose to drink with their meal, however, cuz I missed that part of the ceremony — I was in the adjoining room breastfeeding my infant. But even tho it’s just make-believe, I’ll still write down my guesses for each person’s beverage of choice. No one can stop me from pretending that I know what I’m talking about:
I think that I myself had cheap red table wine; and my sweetheart ordered white wine; and Debbie had ice water with a slice of lemon; and Paul had two drinks, a club soda and a coffee with cream; and Colleen had chocolate milk; and Susan had a green kale smoothie; and Erik had dark beer called “Fish Beer”; and my mom had ale.
The conversation, which is always my favorite part of the meal, managed to avoid both politics and religion, therefore the talk remained light, and there were zero arguments; which slightly saddened me, as arguments are the chef-d’œuvre of the holidays; but, it was tolerable, in the end, because I got to tell how I recently became a convert to the standard boring U.S. seasonal traditions, after Halloween went so well: I explained how all our neighbors came trick-or-treating at our house and greeted us warmly and welcomed us to the neighborhood, and this gave me a change of heart, so now no longer am I a stick-in-the-mud and an ornery angry old man who hates children and wants nothing to do with society but on the contrary I’ve blossomed into a tenderhearted old geezer who greets every passerby in singsong fashion, and I’ll probably even display Christmas lights this year.
After dinner, we all proceeded to the billiards room to play billiards. Then Susan and Erik introduced us to a drawing game that they learned how to play mere days ago at Erik’s family bash. Here’s how it goes:
Each individual gets a chance to be the center of attention. When it’s your turn, you draw a card from a deck. Each card has a description written on it, like “The Lord Christ befriending a Space Invader,” or “Adam and Eve in their garden, unashamed.” Your job is to draw a picture of this phrase. Then you reveal your painting to the audience, and all the rest of the players try to guess the title of the work, and how much they are willing to pay to own it. It goes without saying that nobody but the artist herself knows the actual title and value of the masterpiece. Once everyone has inscribed their guesses on wax tablets using a stylus, the guesses are read aloud solemnly by the artist, and the original (correct) answer is included among the rest. Everyone must now guess which of these choices is the work’s true title & value. Players are awarded points both for guessing correctly and also when other players are duped into believing that their own composition represents what a consensus of critics might deem worthy of fixing the standard of measurement associated with…
Long story short: the game was fun. We got to draw stuff and write names and laugh. Then we all stood up and said our goodbyes and went home. Cuz we’re all old now, and we go to bed early. Except for the baby: the baby’s still young, and he never actually sleeps.
In closing, I’d like to thank my mom for making a wonderful meal, and for allowing us to take home truckloads of leftovers. This was definitely one of the best November Thursdays I’ve ever withstood. It nearly left me feeling thankful.
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