The Feast of Our Consumption

Welcome, you smug bon-bon eaters, fresh from a hard day of clicking the remote control while lounging on the couch, work a distant memory in your minds. You missed a breathtaking Day Before Thanksgiving Potluck Lunch. But not to worry--I will bring that DBTPL to you.

I'm sure you are picturing Val and her colleagues dressed in their Thanksgiving finery, gathered around one long table made of many, said table draped with a linen tablecloth, featuring a centerpiece of steaming pumpkin soup in an actual pumpkin tureen, the handle of a carved-gourd ladle elegantly curling over the side, orange and yellow candles providing ambiance as we join hands and give thanks for the feast set before us by the FACS teacher and her minions.

This is where the screech of a needle across a phonograph record jars you back to reality. So much for listening to that Charlie Brown theme music.

We trickled into the teacher workroom to fill our paper plates. The FACS room had been commandeered by the FACS teacher (the very nerve of her!) to hold class. Since she became our go-to gal for turkey procurement, we forgave her. Dress on this special day is best described as informal. Our spread lay sprawled upon the counter between the stainless steel sink and the cardboard cubbyhole slots that house the vital forms and receive the ISS assignments. Candles would have been a nice touch, because one of the overhead fluorescents had gone kaput. The soft glow of the soda machine almost made up for it.

Kyocera stood against the opposite wall, jutting out Drawer 1 like a delinquent with a chip on his shoulder. His longtime companion, Canon, was not himself, having been dismantled yesterday when a repairman cannibalized him for his top parts, so necessary to the convalescence of the office Canon. These vital organs are no longer being donated by dying copiers, nor synthesized in mad-scientist laboratories. Such is the state of copier health care in Backroads.

At the head of our buffet sat the turkey, light and dark. I took a tad of each, the white meat being a mistake, what with turning out to be virtually inedible, even after removing a ropey vein and trying to cut through shiny cartilage with a white plastic fork and spoon. Cold mashed potatoes were next. No flavoring. No butter. Perhaps no potato. On to the Hot Wing Dip. It's a school potluck favorite of mine. Luckily the chicken in it replaced my turkey protein. I snagged a hot roll cold from the cardboard box, to sop up my HWD. I passed up the broccoli stems in cheese sauce, the stuffing, the gravy, the boiled shrimp, the green bean casserole, the corn casserole, the deer sausage with Ritz crackers. On to the dessert counter, under the window next to the laminator. I forwent the apple dumplings, the chocolate pudding pie, and the triple-chocolate cake, going straight to my Mississippi Mud cake that I bought at Country Mart. Which nearly caused a rumble.

A kind, caring soul, do-gooding her way around the venue, took it upon herself to slice all desserts. She meant well. Thought she was providing a vital service, you know, because we were in a hurry, and no knives were in evidence. Goody Soul had found one plastic knife. She popped the tops off the desserts and commenced to cuttin'. I told her I would be having a piece of the Mississippi Mud. Goody Soul kindly carved a section to my liking. "I just washed my hands," she said, before holding the top of my cake slice with four fingers to keep it on the knife. That stuff doesn't bother me. I'm sure she's clean enough. It was what I discovered later that bothered me.

At the end of the half day, I saw people fetching their leftovers and scurrying to their cars. I went in to grab my cake. I worked hard walking into the store to slide my debit card and buy it. There it sat. Just where I'd left it some two hours earlier. One slice gone. And twelve slices remaining. Do you get what I'm getting at? I can hardly re-bring that mutilated baked good to my mom's Thanksgiving dinner on Thursday. Goody Soul had sliced the entire cake. Let me spell it out for you, in case physics is not your first language. My storeboughten cake, which would have had two surface areas exposed from my cut-out slice, now had twenty-four surface areas exposed. Surface areas receptive to receiving airborne contaminants. Surface areas eager to evaporate their internal moisture. AND the number of pieces meant that Goody Soul had not even been symmetrical in her slicing. She gave me one piece, then cut twelve more. Thirteen pieces from one cake.

That's gotta be a goocher somewhere.