A Thanksgiving Day memory

It was Thanksgiving day 1976 and Aunt Rageaholic and Uncle Adultery were taking the first few tentative steps on the road to their messy divorce. Tension was high all around because they were fighting tooth and nail and it inevitably rubbed off on us kids, some of us more than others.

My older brother Charlie was above the fray and he did his best to ignore everything and anything until it directly affected him. Cousin Smart Ass and his younger brother Cousin Psycho were jockeying for the Alpha male position among us kids so they were butting heads just like their mom and dad. The young females, my sister Sandy and Cousin Skank, stayed out of the way during most of the fighting and jockeying. I was not interested at all in doing any fighting or chest thumping so I mostly just watched and made wisecracks when things got crazy or I would hang out with my younger cousin, Sam who is now deceased, and you'll learn more about him in another post one of these days.

Anyway, on this particular Thanksgiving we were to go to dinner at a local minister's house. I forget his name but he was part of a cabal of evangelicals who came down from Minnesota. He ministered to about 3 or 4 small churches in the areas, he'd preach at one church one Sunday and another the next and so on and so on. He was a big affable guy who was actually very nice despite the fact that he was a minister in a christian sect whose members had religion shoved so far up their asses that it came out of their mouths whenever they drew a breath.

We were supposed to go to his house and have dinner with him and his wife and their daughter, all of them were big ol' corn fed people, if you know what I mean, around five in the evening so we had all day to kill. I tried to kill the time by reading and watching football. I remember quite clearly that I wanted desperately to watch the Redskins/Cowboys game that day but I was not allowed to because no one else watched liked football and most all my cousins made fun of me for liking sports and they usually taunted me when they knew it was on and I was not being allowed to watch it.

I was moping around about not being able to see my beloved Redskins play when I decided that I had had enough, I decided to march into the trailer where we lived at the time and I was going to turn on the game and see whatever I could of it. But as I opened the door Cousin Smart Ass and Cousin Psycho came rolling out in a flurry of punches, kicks, and grunts. Their mom and dad's verbal sparring had caused their sons to fight one another. I watched with more than a little glee as my would be tormentors turned on themselves for a change. I took a great amount of satisfaction in seeing them get into trouble for fighting and for dirtying up their clothes before our trip to the minister's house. Their dad broke them up and he told them to go get cleaned up and after they did we left for our dinner out.

Things simmered between them and between their parents but they were all able to put their bad feelings aside and act like decent people while we ate. The minister found out I was a football fan like he was so he conspired to leave the game on while we ate. He assured me it would stay on and that I could watch it with no interruption.

His wife however had other ideas, she made him turn off the TV while we ate. I was sad about not being able to see the end of the game and my cousins picked up on it and they taunted me about having to miss the ending of the game. I laughed it off because my team was ahead and I did my best to ignore them. But being the baying jackals they were they kept on making fun of me, but in a flash I saw there on the table my instrument of revenge, and it was a big bowl of pinto beans. There are two things in this world that give me the foulest smelling gas that a human being can emit and those two things are buckwheat flour and pinto beans. The more they made fun of me for not being able to watch the game, the more beans I ate. I shoveled those beans in my face as fast as my teen age arm would let me. I passed on having seconds of turkey and dressing so that I could have more and more beans. I ate practically the whole bowl of those brown little gas bombs and then I sat back and waited for the beans of mass destruction to take effect.

I began squeezing off smelly volleys of gas about an hour after dinner and I managed to let them loose while sitting or standing next to my cousins. My evil plan began paying benefits almost as soon as my noxious emissions hit the atmosphere. But I knew the best was yet to come.

We said our goodbye's to the minister and his family and we all packed into the big Chevy Suburban that we used to have and we began our journey home. Once everyone was in the vehicle I could let my farts wreak their full havoc. The gas roiled around in me and I did my dead level best to let it out. I was the king of 'silent but deadly' on that ride home. Everyone bitched and moaned about the stench but to me it was the smell of victory. I laughed my teenage ass off when we finally got home and everyone scrambled to get out of the car. I smiled sweetly and said, "I guess I ate too many beans." As they gasped for fresh air I laughed some more.

But it turned out that the Cowboys had the last laugh in the whole matter because a little known quarterback named Clint Longley came off the bench and led his team to a last second win over my Redskins. When I saw that in the paper the next day I turned and faced the general direction of Dallas, Texas and I cut the cheese once more.