Updated December 29, 2009
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Christmas of the White Turkey
The white turkey was the result of my first (and only) attempt at making Christmas dinner. Do not cook a turkey in a small microwave oven. What you will get is a very white, very raw bird.
There was Mother and Jane and the boys and my brother. And my father - drunk. Dinner was a disaster. Dessert was my father slouched at the table in a drunken stupor bawling out his remorse of a life wasted in alcohol.
I took the boys upstairs and sang to them to get away from his pain and mine.
They've forgotten. I haven't.
Postscript December, 2005
In fact, the boys (now grown men) have not forgotten that Christmas. However, it has been a good lesson on perspective for me. You see, their memory of that Christmas is that it was a good one. If nothing else it has provided years of family humour recalling the ‘white turkey’.
Surely I am not alone in having certain times in my life which, in the memory, is like a wash of grey muck brushed across the landscape of my soul.
Christmas of 1981 was one of those times. We were flat out broke with no money for a tree, let alone presents to put under it. Mind you, we were given a tree. Except, it fell out of the trunk of the car on the way home. By the time we went back for it, somebody, hopefully more needy than we, had taken it.
