Page Two of Goosed
Came dinner time, I pulled a gorgeously browned, sizzling, picture-perfect goose out of the oven.
“See if Dad is up to dinner,” I told the son who had just set out his contribution of marzipan-and-nut-stuffed baked apples. Another son was wrestling with a huge pan of wild rice with chestnuts, and the third was tossing a fancy autumn slaw that contained zucchini and nuts and had taken hours of chopping (pre Cuisinart).
John crept into the dining room in his bathrobe, and sat quietly in his chair. His shoulders were drawn up as if he were cold, and he was very pale, but he stood up and began to carve the goose.
“Oh,” he said suddenly. “It’s all dark meat, and I don’t like dark meat.”
“It’s a game bird,” I snapped; “of course it’s dark meat. And it’s delicious dark meat, too.” He served himself a small portion, and we began to eat. Soon the boys were discussing their parts in the meal. They began by arguing the merits (or rather, the lack of merits) of sweet side dishes that had marzipan in them
“That was a lot of WORK,” my sous-chef growled. “Eat it and shut up.”
“This rice is hard and funny,” said another son, “and the chestnuts look like little brains.”
“I made it exactly the way the recipe said to,” said his brother.
“Eeeew!” said the third as he poked at the slaw. I looked down the table in an effort to enlist their father’s support in quashing the rebellion. John was sitting hunched over, eyelids at half mast, face quite green. He hadn’t touched his food.
“I think I need to be excused,” he said, and crept off to bed.
“Some Christmas dinner,” came a mutinous murmur from one of the boys.
I tried to look at the bright side.
“At least we’ve got pies,” I said cheerfully. There was a chorus of “ No Ways!” from my sons.
“Flu germ-pies?” said the youngest. “I’ll have ice cream, thanks.”
We cleared the table and I wrapped the leftover goose to give to our local soup kitchen. I checked John’s temperature. It was 102.5. The boys and I ate our ice cream at the kitchen table and fed the pies to the garbage disposal, since they refused to believe that the hot oven could have killed the germs, and I wasn’t about to sit down to two whole pies. The house was eerily quiet. It didn’t feel like Christmas at all.
The kids went off to a movie, since John wasn’t up to the annual read-aloud of A Child’s Christmas in Wales. That lovely little book begins:
“One Christmas was so much like another, in those years…that I can never remember whether it snowed for six nights and six days when I was twelve, or for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.”¹
Well, I thought to myself, not in this house this year. And I hope there will never be another one like it. This year will go down in history as The Year of the Goose.
And so it has.
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¹A Child’s Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas
©1954 by New Directions Books
©2004 Julia Sneden for SeniorWomenWeb
