Thanksgiving has to be my favorite holiday. We don’t usually travel. I just kick back and watch football while my wife Kim makes dinner, which is always amazing. Sometimes we have friends over, sometimes it’s just us. Good food, football, friends, fun, wine … what can go wrong? Actually, more than you’d think.
Maybe it’s some bizarre form of karma, , but I have a long history of Thanksgiving day disasters. It all started more than 30 years ago …
I was sharing a little Dallas apartment with my girlfriend at the time, Sue. She put a bird in the oven and we went out to Texas Stadium to see the Cowboys play. Unbeknownst to us, the pan was too shallow and, while were out, grease from the bird overflowed onto the heating element. When we got home and opened the oven door, the stove went up in flames.
Our Thanksgiving dinner consisted of McDonalds and vodka. Lots of vodka.
Fast forward five or six years …
Kim and I are newlyweds who’d just sold my condo on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. We had to close on the townhome we were buying the same day to avoid being out on the street with all our stuff in a moving van until Monday. Come 5 o’clock, the title company said they were calling it a night, but our realtor threw a fit and refused to leave, so they worked late and got it done.
We thought we were out of the woods. No such luck.
We spent that night and Thanksgiving morning moving into our new place, but when Kim turned on the stove to start cooking the bird, nothing happened. Turns out, somebody forgot to call the gas company and, since they don’t work holidays and it was not an emergency, that was that.
This time, it was KFC from down the street. I don’t remember what we drank.
Things were good for a long time after that, until …
18 years later, we finished 18 months of construction on our new home and got the official sign-off from the county to move in on, you guessed it, the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. Fortunately, our existing house was on the same property – just 50 feet away, actually – so moving in was a piece of cake.
Kim woke up early to get started on the very first meal in our brand new kitchen – we had friends coming over to celebrate the blessed event. Remembering what had happened long ago, she was relieved to see that the gas was working. But when she turned on the water faucet, nothing came out.
She got me out of bed and, when I went up to check the water tanks (we’re on a well), as I suspected, they were dry. We’d lived on that property off that same well for 13 years and that had never happened before. We called our pump guy. He wouldn’t come out. I finally found someone who’d just started his own company and was willing to come out on turkey day and save our you-know-whats. Luckily, it was just a faulty protection circuit in the well pump that had absolutely nothing to do with the new house. Just a strange coincidence that it happened that day … on Thanksgiving.
A couple of hours later, we were back in business and everything turned out fine.
That was nine years ago. Fire, gas, water … every year, we wake up on Thanksgiving day and wonder, what’s next?
Wishing y’all a safe, happy and uneventful Thanksgiving!