Another Gathering

Last year the turkey caught on fire.

This year - it wasn't ready in time - so the lasagna was pulled out first and me and a couple of teenagers were devouring it while the traditionalists waited and waited for the turkey.

Dad takes a small piece and complains about how he doesn't like spaghetti sauce or cheese and my sister is trying to get him to wait for the turkey.

Finally same arrives and a lot of us were stuffed already. After the pre-teens analyze the latest Harry Potter movie - seems they didn't like it but I couldn't understand half of what they were talking about. The teens and younger kids retire to the bedroom where they attached some Atari game box to the t.v. and play a game about hijacking trucks. Lots of violence and bad language.

The old folks came into the room but the kids wouldn't let them touch the game controls and the sound was turned down so they couldn't hear all the bad words. I got to play for about 30 seconds and drove my truck over a cliff into some water. I drowned.

In the living room - there were a lot of single 50-ish women talking about good places to go dancing and whatever happened to the Candy Stripe lounge that they frequented in the 80's.

The old folks couldn't get into that either. (Neither could I).

I had been instructed before hand to try and keep my big mouth shut and let the old folks control the conversation and not to bring up politics (which always leads to arguments). Fine with me. But it backfired when the talk was dominated by the ladies and their dance down memory lane and I was told afterwards that I should have brought up politics because those arguments are the highlight of any get-together. Oh well. Next time.

So my birthday is Dec. 1st - and every Thanksgiving I tell dad I don't want to celebrate it at Thanksgiving and sure enough there I am again with everyone surprising me with a cake and candle and me yelling, "God, how many times do I have to tell you - I don't want to do this at Thanksgiving."

One candle in the cake. I go to grab it to take it out and blow on it - and get into a control struggle with dad who wants me to blow it out while it's still in the cake. I make a grab for it again and a chocolate strawberry falls off, rolls under the table - and the dog goes for it. The dog isn't much bigger than the chocolate strawberry.

Chocolate (so they tell me) is poison for this breed of dog - so now there's a mad scramble under the table to get the chocolate strawberry from the dog with people surrounding the poor mutt and someone knocks over the coffee pot on the new white rug.

Oh the horror. Quick - use baking soda. No, use soda water. The women all advance their own secret formulas but the stain is spreading.

Why'd you knock off the chocolate strawberry?

Sorry.

Then someone starts singing: how old are you now? How old are you now?

"I'm 54," I say.

"No you're not," my middle sister says. She must be calculating her own age.

"I think I know how old I am. Do you wanna see my driver's license!"

Someone in the backroom must have hit the volume control because some very dirty words are filtering from the game into the living room. Horrified parents rush in to see what's going on and discover the obscenity filled game and want to know where this came from. In the confusion, they hit some other button and now all the bad politically unmentionable words are booming through the house.

I'm still thinking about how it feels to be 54. 6 years from 60. No way around that.

My uncle Hy was dead already at my age and had accomplished so much more.

Dad is wandering around looking for the check he was going to give me for my birthday. He can't find it. He's worried that he may have dropped it in the elevator because he was signing it as he came up. So out he goes to search the elevator. His eighty-year old companion is searching her pocketbook, either for her glasses or for the envelope.

And then it happens - the final coup de grace. Dad's companion asks me how I like the poster she brought back from somewhere as a gift. (I had passed it on to my sister for her house). Somehow, I know, by the way she was asking - that I had passed it on to Jean.

Now Jean is too cagey to have said anything - but her teenage daughter - she might have said something about the poster.

I excuse myself to go back to the other room where the hijacking game has been confiscated and ask my niece if she mentioned anything about the poster to anyone. She tells me that she might have mentioned the Van Gogh Bedroom print to someone dad's companion and sticks the iPod pods back in her ears.

Good God. Now what.

"I heard that you gave it to your sister," my father's companion is saying behind me. First time I've seen her move all night - and she's quick and silent as a cat and wearing magnifying glasses on her eyes.

"Well - I - "

Here eyes are huge.

"We brought it all the way back from Milan, you know. Especially for you. Your father picked it out. "

Meanwhile, dad comes back - unable to find the missing check. But he has a hat with him. Someone left their hat in the elevator.

The women are scrubbing the rug.

The kids are crying in the other room about the confiscation of the game.

I'm searching for an explanation for why I gave the poster away. Finally: "I didn't want to hurt your feelings, but I had that poster already. That's why I gave it to my sister."

"Really," she says suspiciously. She'd love to see the poster next time she visits me, so I'm going to have to get to the Museum of Art and get another one. I hope it says printed in Milan on the back.

As people are leaving - I'm invited to play anagrams. There are two anagram sets in the house. One is the actual real anagrams game (impossible to find these days); and the other one is just a bottle filled with scrabble tiles. The realanagrams set belongs to my sister's mother-in-law. I haven't mentioned her yet but she is not an old lady to trifle with (former high-school principal).

I say, "Let's play with the real set." My sister says, "what real set?"

I say, "You know - the actual set - we played with it the other day."

Her mother-in-law says: "You have a real anagrams set? Where did you find it? Took me years to find one. Finally found an old one on eBay."

Well, apparently my sister - who is giving me signs to shut up - stole it from her mother-in-laws house.

"Don't you remember, you loaned it to us a while back," she stammers.

Mother-in-law doesn't remember and starts in on a story about how difficult it was to find that set. They don't make them anymore.

Sister continues with her fable: "Remember, we were playing at your house and you said I could borrow it for a while?"

The dog begins to cough. He's been licking whatever they've been pouring on the coffee stain and it's making him puke. He almost pukes on the anonymous hat, but misses.

So that pretty much wraps things up as we take care of the dog; and a big fat guy in a florid bathrobe comes to the front door - somehow he's heard that my father found his hat. I don't know how he found out - my father must have involved the doorman at some point - but he takes his hat sticks it on his head and as he wanders away I notice some specks of dog-puke on it.