CAUTION: I may have allready told this story here in Mudville but can't rightly remember and don't want to go thru 10,000 plus post to see if I have so... BTW, do not read this story unless you have 10 or 15 minutes of your life to completely waste... End of CAUTION... _____________________________________________________________________
"Bobert's Christmas Story"
Okay, before we can get this story goin'...
...we need to introduce the the cast of characters. Playing Bobert is Bobert... Playing Bobert's wife is the mother of my son, Will (Ben to you, don't ask...), Sheila. Playing the neighborhood bad dog is Taylo, who by no choic of mine spent the last 5 years of his life sleeping in my house thinkin' he was my dog??? Hah!!! Sumabich were no more my dog than... Well, nevermind him for now 'cause we are in the midst of introducin' the cast... Okay, playing my parent were my parents who, at the time of the story, were living in Kansas City, Mo. and who I hadn't seen in maybe, ahhhhh, 4 or 6 years...
The year was I think 1981 but it might have been 1980 or even 1982 so we'll just paly safe with 1981. We were living in a great old 20's house in South Richmond with 5 bedrooms and 4 working firplaces just a stones throw from the James River... My parents had flown east to visit with my brother and his family in Loudoun County, Va. and the plan was for them to borrow my brother's car, drive to Richmond and spent Christmas Day with Sheila and me...
Having not seen my parents in 4 ot 6 years I wanted everything to be perfect and had a checklist of things to do before they arrived, Yup, we were going to have a wonderful Christmas Day and a big Christmas Day feast of turkey and all the fixin's and everything was in place for a perfect day...
The morning of Christmas Eve we took the frozen turkey out, put it on the back porch to thaw, and as it spent the day thawing we went around the house checking things off the checklist and by that evening every "t" had been dotted and every "i" crossed and we went to bed just knowing that all would be well... Afterall, it *was* Christmas, right???
Well, my fellow Catters, Christmas morning arrived and all was very mellow with music, fresh ground coffee and not a problem to be had until...
...Sheila went to the back porch to get the turkey so it could get cooking but instead of a turkey on the back porch there was an echo... No turkey!!! What??? Did that turkey wake up in the middle of the night, peek thru the door into the kitchen, see that oven, grow back all the stuff he used to have before going to live in the Fresh FoodMart frozen turkey department and fly the heck away??? This weren't a high crime area and, well, it just didn't make any sense...
Now, friends, with my parents 5 hours from knocking on the front door, it don't take a rocket surgeon to tell ya' that you got a big problem... We're talkin' Christmas morning here!!!
So the poor ol' Bobert got on the phone to see if he could find a grocery store open that might have a thawed turkey but, shoot it was Christmas morning and just finding a grocery store open was a true blessing from the Big Guy, hisself, but I found one on the other end of town... No, they didn't have any thawed turkeys but they did have 3 or 5 frozen ones left in the frozen turkey department so I figured...
...danged if I know what I figgured... All I knew is that I had to do something.... And fast... So I cranked up my ol' 1969 Volkswagen bus and raced over to the grocery store hoping I'd beat the the other folks who had somehow managed to misplace their turkeys and worry about thawing the sumabich when I got it home... But in the way doen to the grocery store some very intersting thoughts came thru my mind about just how one sould go about thawing a frozen turkey... Yeah, the first idea was to take it to the laudramat and put it in a commercial clothes dryer and then I thought I'd just take it home and get in a hot shower with it and turn it 'round and 'round like some kinda thawin' rotiserrie then I thought...
Nevrmind what I thought... I hate to get banned from Mudcat on Chritmas Eve but on the way home I had the turkey right next to the heater in the VW bus hoping that would help...
(Heat in a VW bus, Bobert??? In the winter??? Hhahahaha...)
Knowing that time was not on my side I drove as fast as the bus would go... like 35 mph... and took all the short cuts even heading down an alley a block away from my house to aviod a stop sign... I was flying down that alley at 34 or 35 mph when a rather large whitish object caught me eye so I slammed on the brakes, slid back the frost covered driver's side window, looked down in the drainage ditch and there before my very own eyes was the runaway turkey... "Hmmmmmm, how did it get a half a block away" immediately came to mind but I was down to "P Minus 4" and there wasn't time for any additional thinking on my part as I jumped out grabbed the turkey, threw it on the passenger seat just a few feet from it's frozen couzin next to the heater (haha) and prodeeded the last half a block to the our house...
So I ran in the house with the thawed bird in one hand and its frozen couzin in the other and dropped them both into the kitchen sink...
Well, folks... Do you remember me telling you about the cast of characters??? Remember Taylo, the sumab.... ahhhh, dog??? Well the thawed turkey had several punctured in the plastic wrappin bag that looked one heck of alot like the kind of holes one might expect to see if a dog had tried to bite its way into a thawing turley in a plastic wrapper... Plus, the turkey was found in an alley where Taylo loved to hang out so Sheila and I summized that that sumab... ahhhh, dog had tried to make off with the turkey... Heck, maybe it had happened just a minutes before Sheila discovered it missing and dropped it and ran... Who knows???
We took the turkey out of the plastic wrapping bag, examined the bird and it's frozen cousin and decided, "What the Hell??? You can't cook a frozen bird" and so cook it we did...
My parents arrived and everything went great... They loved the house and we all had a grand ol' time opening presnts and visiting and then it was time for "The Christmas Dinner"... Everything was wonferful... My mom, bless her heart, said the turkey was the best she had ever eaten and my dad, well, he went back for second and maybe thirds...
After dinner we were all sitting around enjoying coffee and a little B&B liquir and I just happened to look over at Sheile and she at me and we both just broke out laughing uncontrollably liker school kids. My folks, of course, were wondering just what the inside joke was about. Hey, I had to tell them... Then there we all were... Laughing uncontrolably like school kids, sipping coffee and liquir and digesting dog chew-on turkey...
I don't think it gets any better than that, my friends... But my advice to you this Christmas Eve is that if you are thawing your turkey on the back porch you might just want to bring it inside for the night...
The End
Merry Christmas to all my friends here in Mudville and if you haven't heard the story I hope you enjoyed it and if you have, its still worth a reread...