In passing

Whoever writes the local-feature obits for the Sunday Post had a field day this past week, writing about an elderly widow who had loved her parakeet Snookie so much that she asked that they be buried together. "Her request was to be buried with Snookie. If the bird went first, she wanted him stored in the freezer until she died. She appreciated the family comeback that if Snookie outlived her, a relative would buy a large freezer in which to keep her."

The bird died in September; the widow, in April. Her daughter-in-law notified the rest of the family via e-mail.

Header: "It's time to defrost Snookie."

Cue the Gloria Gaynor

I and the grands survived the weekend intact, despite family aggro and the best efforts of a black Acura on the Beltway yesterday. Metro DC drivers are shite, something that's much clearer after a weekend in the company of Jersey's turnpike-hardened speedsters, and I would've finished out the weekend in a better mood had not that random dink nearly created a single crunchy unit of our separate vehicles. I could also have done without the primly censorious comment from my backseat passenger, who felt that cursing the air blue was not an appropriate reaction to a near-death experience. Oh tempora, o mores, cannot a woman be left in peace to work off an adrenaline surge with some fine Anglo-Saxon imprecations?

Random note: I do not want this shirt, but I'm happy that it exists. [H/T Cleolinda]

The Atlantic continues to tempt me with its evil tempty wiles. This time the editors have republished a weirdly contemporary 1957 article, "Sex and the College Girl." Worth a read, if only to further nail down the coffin lid over the idea that the 1950s were a pure asexual time when everyone knew their place and were happy about it. The dating culture described has changed some since the article first saw the light of day, but the intricate calculus around it still rings a bell.

Gearing up for appetite

Chez La Mère and Il Padre, there are strong opinions about Thanksgiving, now of course shared by Seesterperson and yours truly. The most important thing is that the food has to be right: roast turkey, stuffing without weird shit like oysters, mashed potatoes and gravy, cranberry relish AND canned cranberry sauce in slices, a bowl of celery and olives (I came across a reference to a similar presentation in an Edith Wharton novel, so it was neat to hear that this particular item is something my mother picked up from her grandparents), some green beans. Extras are allowed but may not be encouraged to return, as was the case with creamed onions. Dessert is pie, with a choice of pumpkin, pecan, and sometimes sweet potato or, in a few grim years, mincemeat, and heaping dollops of homemade whipped cream flavored with a touch of Mexican vanilla. The drink of choice is Piper Brut. Anyone can propose a toast at any point, but the meal must begin with a toast before anyone starts sneaking olives or a stray crouton from the stuffing.

The culinary traditions are taken so seriously that we have had at least three do-overs. One year I was too sick to eat on the regular day, and life happened for a while after that, so come late winter La Mère went out and found a turkey and the rest of it and sat us all down to the meal because we were going to by God give some thanks, and none of us was disposed to say her nay. Two do-overs happened during years when we had traveled and been served subpar meals elsewhere (my godmother's third husband poured rum into the stuffing "to keep the turkey moist while it cooks!" and the bird tasted like it had died twitching at the DTs), and we all felt like the seams on our clothes were in the wrong places, bad feng shui of the holiday alimentary system or something, until we had the right version of the festal board.

And, of course, this is all completely normal. Like so many people, I didn't realize until fairly late that anyone else was so benighted as to mess with the clear recipe for success. Sure, there are the bizarre suggestions about things to do with turkeys from Gourmet and Martha Stewart and their ilk, but nobody took them seriously, right? It is a relief, therefore, to reread Tomato Nation's screed on Thanksgiving and the sacred nature thereof and to remember that it ain't the food, it's the family.

Talk Like a Pirate and Give Thanks Day

Let the news be Paul Revere'd throughout the land: Tomorrow is International Talk Like a Pirate Day, so limber up your yarrhs and advance the fight against global warming.

Tomorrow is also the anniversary of my father's MI. He's a traditionalist, so he went with the standard "older guy cleaning up after a storm" model of cardiac distress that the ERs expect. In the wake of Hurricane Isabel, Il Padre was clearing the back yard of the fallen trees, with the help of a neighbor and the neighbor's eighty-year-old father. Here's a fun fact: Old guys from farming communities in the highlands of Guatemala are often much more physically fit than suburban Americans, and if a member of the latter party is trying to keep up with one from the former, badness can ensue. Badness did ensue. La Mère took one look at Il Padre and packed him into the car for the five-minute drive to our local hospital, which for all its tremendous failings takes you seriously if you show up and mumble "chest pain" to the triage nurse.

I didn't hear about this at first, because the power in my neck of the woods was still out and so I had no phone. But the news made it eventually, mostly via increasingly panicked calls from pay phones, and I made it down to Virginia to join the tag-team cycle of visitors to Il Padre's cherry spot in the curtained wards, where he was surrounded by bleeping machines and looking faintly embarrassed. After getting all the assurances on offer, I went back to the waiting room ("Tag, who's next?") and called my boyfriend, who said all the right things and helped keep the relative level of calm high without being soppy, for which I am still grateful.

And then around 10 PM La Mère and Seesterperson and K-Rock and I went home and made tea, because that's what you do when shit goes down, and we realized that it was International Talk Like a Pirate Day and we had missed it. So each year I call Il Padre on September 19 and remind him, "Arrh, me surly sea squid, belay them MIs for another twelvemonth." So far so good, and that's reason 1,273,448 that pirates are better than ninjas.