Thanksgiving 2024: Turkey Talk

On Thanksgiving weekend last year, I was getting a pair of pants fitted by Roman, a talented tailor I have known for years. Chatting, he reminded me of a cooking tip I had given him eons ago: roasting a turkey on a bed of vegetables.

I had zero recollection of giving this advice, nor do I remember ever using it in my own short-lived practice of roasting Thanksgiving turkeys. I am sure that the couple of times I did roast turkeys, I read about the vegetable bed method on some website or another and adopted it as my own.

All this has less to do with how to roast turkey than with the way our most fleeting words can live on unbeknownst to us. Maybe I was once passionate about turkey roasting, or maybe I was making trivial conversation. Either way, my words have lived on and manifested at Roman’s Thanksgiving table annually. I trust that his turkeys are roasted to perfection.

And what other words of mine have lived on without my knowing it? Were they practical, wise, and charitable? Did they convey the optimism I try to impose on the world daily? Or were they mincing, petty, or gossipy, good for a quip or a laugh but cutting into the future?

Now that I have published this blog for over two years, perhaps something parenthetical or unimportant I wrote in September of ’22 is still lurking in someone’s head. If so, I hope those words represent me at my best rather than my most churlish. 

Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life is a movie whose message I appreciate more than the long slog of the film itself. The particulars of George Bailey’s life, so painstakingly chronicled, elude me. The message that the slightest actions can have longstanding consequences takes up space in my head just like my turkey talk does in Roman’s.

My Thanksgiving wish for all of you is that your words and actions resonate with warmth and purpose far into the future.

Now, go roast a turkey on a bed of vegetables. And Happy Thanksgiving.