Friday, November 29, 2013

Thanksgiving

We deep-fried our turkeys yesterday.

No, I am not going turn this into a cooking blog (but you simply must try it).

Anyway, we bought this fryer that needed to be assembled, so I did that in the morning. (Only one piece was left over, which is good, for me.)

Ansel Adams: Old Faithful
The best part about this is that you can prepare your turkey for consumption in less than an hour. I cooked two birds. The thing is, though -- you have to stay with it. I know from working in restaurants, during my school years, that you can't trust hot grease. In short, I had to sit outside, in the cold, for two hours, watching turkeys do their danse macabre in the in the roiling liquid.

Once I dropped the first one in (after the initial violent bubbling and the spew of liquid death) I thought about calling one of my sons to get the book I'm reading. Instead, I sat close enough to the fryer for warmth but far enough to avoid blindness, and I watched: pot, sky, trees, clouds and all of sunshine's creation .


Reading is good; don't get me wrong. I highly encourage it. (Duh.) But, if I had called my son to get the book; if I had dug into the next chapter, I would have missed something wonderful:

Sitting upwind of the pot, I could watch the silken white steam form, rise into the cold and curl into a languid spin, coquettishly dancing toward me on the wind to disappear into the blue autumn forever. If I had wrapped myself up into an intellectual process, I would have missed that entirely.

For two blessed hours, this is what I did. My mind was free and my heart was full.

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