Giving thanks in scary times

     “Do you think 28 pounds of turkey is enough?” asked my wife, as we stood by a freezer case in Trader Joe’s.
     She had just muscled two Kosher birds, one 15 pound, one 13, into the cart, waving away my offer to do the lifting, the “as if I haven’t been flinging these things around a kitchen myself for years” being unvoiced.
     “Well,” I ventured. “Twenty five guests, about a pound per person should ..."
     “A lot of it is bone,” she interjected. Not to inform me, I hope. I don’t think she really feared I’m so culinarily clueless as to imagine whole turkeys are solid chunks of meat — I do sometimes carve them, though invariably am body-checked away by a relative capable of more finesse with a blade.
     Last year we had three turkeys — one roasted, one deep-fried, one smoked. That was deemed “too much turkey,” though not by me. I want to spend the next few days assembling plates of cold leftovers, turkey and stuffing, and eating them standing in the kitchen, and assume every guest does too.
     “You are making five pounds of salmon,” I observed. For the pescatarians — those who shun meat, but whose moral code nevertheless allows them to eat fish: sentient creatures, innocently plying the waters, nuzzling their young with human-like affection, at one with nature and the divine until a cruel hook yanks them into the suffocating air.

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