Enjoy

It is the season. I'm a little melancholy for past years. The last few years I've spent Thanksgiving at a bar while doing laundry. This particular bar puts on a great spread and it's for anyone who has no place to go. I would go and not eat but just drink and was happy others partook of the feast. That brings me to a story with no particular rhyme or purpose. The three legged turkey. Now this happened long ago in my youth, the year perhaps 1960. Surely a different time in many ways. Back then where I grew up there was a grocery store on the corner of every block. That's where my mother bought our turkey of that year. As you might guessed I was pretty young so it's from faded memory that I recall the events of that thanksgiving. While I was out playing my mother was preparing the Turkey she had purchased the previous day from the butcher. Now you have to understand my mother was not the sharpest knife in the kitchen. As she was washing the bird she oddly noticed that she seemed to be washing the legs an awful lot. She kept spinning the fowl in a perpetual state of confusion. It took probably five minutes before the light came on "Hey sumpten's not right". She figured it out, an extra leg. The following is a very short version of events that followed. She told my sister, my sister told my older brother who then called his soon to be wife. The kids decided to call it in to a radio station. My mother was to shy to talk on air. They got my brother's future wife to ask her mother to pretend that she was our mother for the interview that was to ensue. With a heavy Italian accent she gave a in depth report to the local DJ as to the miraculous bird. Due to her heavy accent I'm not sure how many people understood the going's on. Within about an hour from air time we received a call from the AP. Twenty minutes elapsed when the three local TV stations all converged on our house. Six hours later with a turkey that never had a chance and a house full of hungry kids we tried to feast. There were cameras and lights every where and a house of strangers watching. Being the youngest one there the third leg once emancipated from said carcass was mine. My picture was taken with the distinguished bird for all the nation to see. It was cold and really not worth the wait. But you know what the memories were. Happy Thanksgiving!