Within a few hours, my Thanksgiving Day goes from nonexistent to hosting a dinner for twelve.
Holy crap.
Later in the evening, I receive Stacey’s time and action plan. I sit here at my desk blinking at it, overwhelmed by its precision. Not only does this multiple-paged tome contain an entire menu complete with recipes, but there’s a whole shopping list divided by department and the time action plan breaks out my week in fifteen-minute increments, beginning on Monday.
This is a masterpiece of planning and precision.
To the extent that it’s freaking me out.
I e-mail Stacey the following: “Somewhere in Connecticut, a chill just raced down Martha Stewart’s back.”
She responds: “Poor Martha. Sadly, she is not chilled at all. 1) No Jew could ever out-Thanksgiving a WASP like her and 2) I don’t forge my own silverware or weave my own tablecloth, which just makes me lazy. Go over with Fletch, and make your own menu. You can then delete items off the shopping list for the stuff you aren’t making, and add anything new that you need. (Check your herbs and spices, since I have a good stock of those and they aren’t on my shopping list.) Once you have the menu set, we can make an equipment list.”
Equipment list?
I am so over my head right now.
Things begin to go off the rails before I can even get to step one on Monday. Between finishing edits for My Fair Lazy and driving downtown for an interview for a syndicated columnist position with Tribune Media Services, I lose the whole day. I’m officially in panic mode despite having three whole days before the dinner.
“Thanksgiving is ruined!” I wail.
“Nothing is ruined. The world’s not going to end because you couldn’t get to the cranberry sauce or pickled carrots today. Just relax, you can do this,” Stacey assures me. Well, of course she’s calm—she’s not even making dinner. Her extended family switches off holidays, so this year, all she’s got to do is cook soup.
Stacey talks me off the ledge and even promises to spend the day with me on Wednesday helping to prep.
She doesn’t know it yet, but her reward for helping will be watching Twilight with me on DVD. [No good deed goes unpunished, eh?]
I lose another entire goddamned day to edits, despite my trying to rush. So if you run across errors in My Fair Lazy—and you will—please cut me some slack because Stacey’s time and action plan says nothing about budgeting a day for rewrites.
Fletch is delighted with the idea of a houseful of guests. He’s way more excited than I am, actually, likely because he doesn’t grasp the enormity of the work in front of us. He’s making himself useful and he’s even added his own steps to the time action plan, including:
Steam clean the rug
Finish wiring project
Polish floor
Pick up turkey
Iron linens
Secure weapons [It’s probably a good thing we didn’t have access to any kind of weapons (other than salmonella) during old family holidays.]
Because of other priorities, we don’t get to WFM until Tuesday afternoon. The minute I see cops directing traffic in and out of the garage, I know we’re in trouble.
“I was going to the worst place in the world and I didn’t even know it yet,” Fletch quotes from Apocalypse Now as he tries to navigate past a hybrid that seems to be entirely held together by bumper sticks mocking my every belief. And yet this parking lot chaos is nothing compared to what we find inside.
Ever seen those photos of the two hundred thousand Chinese people at the beach in Qingdao during a heat wave? And there’s not a single grain of sand that isn’t covered by a Chinese dude in a Speedo and a Chairman Mao haircut? And you can’t tell where the ocean of people stop and the ocean proper begins because it’s such a mass of humanity? And you could literally stick out your elbows and be carried into the sea by fellow sunbathers?
That’s exactly what the produce department is like here tonight. For a minute I think we’re going to have to skip the mashed potatoes when the crowd sweeps me over to the onions, but I manage to swim my way back upstream to the tubers.
“This may have been a mistake,” Fletch notes, after we’re wedged into a corner by the Manchego display when hipsters flood the wine bar. I see my favorite cheese monger struggling to keep his head above water as shoppers swarm ten-deep around the counter. I catch his eye as he mouths, “Help.”
“You think so?” I respond.
And that’s when the after-work crowd arrives.
Two hours and a river of blood, sweat, and tears later, we’re done shopping. Those who’ve never lived through the repugnance of war can’t possibly comprehend what we went through, so let me sum it up—we were in the shit. We had only two ways home: death, or victory. Francis Ford Coppola would win another Academy Award were he to make a movie about our experience.
On the way back to the house, we pledge to never speak about the experience again in an effort to keep the post-traumatic stress at bay. If we don’t, someday you’ll see us at the entrance to the expressway holding signs saying Kingsbury Whole Foods Thanksgiving Vet.
We discover our next problem once we arrive home.
“What is all this?” Fletch asks, staring at the boxes currently filling the entire fridge.
“Tracey can’t cook so she sent over some pies as her contribution,” I reply. “FedEx delivered them earlier today.”
“How many pies are there?” He leans deeper in the fridge and begins to count. “Seven? We have seven pies! For nine adults and three children. Does that seem right to you?”
“Why, is that not enough? I’m also making a cake.”
The expression he’s wearing tells me everything I need to know about my ability to do dessert math. We pack all the boxes back into the dry ice they arrived in, then place them in coolers
