Orphan Turkeys
I’ve been making turkey dinner for a very long time.
When I first moved out of my parents house, to go to college, I came home for every Thanksgiving and Christmas. When I moved to Minneapolis post-college, I did the same. It was a nice tradition.
When I moved to New York City, things changed. Home was too far away. I kept Christmas in the “going home” mix, but I made my first Thanksgiving dinner that year. It was a pretty haphazard affair. Turkey and stuffing, potatoes and gravy. I remember someone making some very good from scratch salsa, and sitting around eating chips and salsa and drinking beer, waiting for the bird to cook.
I called it an orphan turkey. It was pretty good. Dry: I cooked it too long. And the gravy was like water, it took me a few years to get good at making gravy.
After we ate, we played poker (quarter limit, dealer’s choice, no wild cards allowed) late into the night, and drank a lot more beer, and a new tradition was born.
For over a decade I made turkey nearly every Thanksgiving, with poker and partying to follow. I can only conjure up two hazy memories where I didn’t. In the first, I opened the turkey package and a foul stench came pouring out, no turkey that year; the bird had thawed too long and gone bad. In the second, all I remember is heating up a disgusting “turkey roll” of pressed turkey in the microwave and being depressed afterward.
All the other NYC Thanksgivings have the same air of a haphazard pot-luck and poker game. I learned how to make a few more dishes, friends began bringing their own sides, it became an actual tradition. The poker games grew larger and became an important fixture. So did the partying. We partied pretty hard back then.
Of the five people who made up that core group of Thanksgiving orphans, two are dead now. One I’ve written about before at the Oort Cloud, twice in fact, in my cantankerous eulogy to a friend and its followup. The circumstances of the other death are a little more in dispute, my own jaded take is that he died in a similar way to the other friend: drugs and drinking and the attendant problems took him down.
It’s worth noting that the three of us that survived those years are thriving (hey John, hey Toby!).
Anyway. After I moved from NYC to Colorado, I made a few more orphan turkeys, but in a few years I was married, and a few years later I had two lovely adopted daughters, and after that I was making turkey for my own family. Another new tradition. I’m pretty good at it by now.
The turkey I’m baking this year will be my first one at this new home I live in with my wife. The girls will be visiting, along with significant others and a brand new baby. One day they’ll begin creating their own traditions, and the cycle will continue.
I’m sure there will be a million columns and blogs and newsletters about giving thanks in the next two days. So I won’t beat that particular horse now. Tomorrow we’ll all go around the table and speak of something we’re thankful for, and I’ll give a pompous little speech while everyone impatiently waits to eat. That’s a part of the tradition that never changes.
For today, I’ll just tip my hat to the young man who made that first turkey years ago, and the friends and family that helped shape that young man. Thanksgiving was one of the first adult things I learned to do on my own (though of course I didn’t do it on my own, all I did was cook the bird). It was a nice first step in establishing my own identity, and building my own life. As my life grew and changed, the shape of the tradition grew and changed. It’s a through-line stringing several decades together, and even though I only really notice once a year, I’m grateful for it.
Happy Thanksgiving. I’ll not try to sell any stories to you today.
Peace.