My Freshman year in college I was working as a grocery store Clerk...One day while I was working the register, a guy came through my line with this terribly depressed look on his face. "Sir, what's the matter?" I asked.
"I have just had the worst day of my life," the man told me. "I am a turkey farmer. When it rained this afternoon, I accidentally left the door unlatched to the building where I keep my turkeys and they all got out..."
I knew where he was going with this...Turkeys are not notoriously brilliant animals...For some reason, when turkeys look up into falling rain, they have no way of keeping raindrops from going into the nasal passages in their beaks...so basically if a turkey gets caught in the rain, he's going to look up at what's hitting him on the head and he's too stupid to not look up or to get out of the rain. Long story short, domestic turkeys always drown in rainstorms...this farmer lost his entire flock that way...
As Garrison Keeler pointed out in one of my favorite of his works, the word "Turkey" means looser or moron...no one wants to be called a "Turkey."
I've also always thought turkeys were very ugly creatures and I've never been able to understand why people sometimes decorate their tables at Thanksgiving with pictures of them...They look okay cooked and on the platter, but in their living form, they're repulsive...it almost makes it so you don't want to eat the juicy meat on your plate...
Another thing that has always bothered me about them is, if you are what you eat, what if the intellect of the turkey can somehow rub off on you??? Let me explain what I mean...
While I was working at the grocery store, we had an interesting mishap involving a turkey...This one actually gets a little violent...(don't worry...no body gets seriously injured in my blog...)
In the meat department, one of the butchers was working with the ground beef when a woman came up to the window to tell him that she wanted her 18 pound turkey cut in half...
The Butcher smiled kindly and told her that it would be just a moment because he was elbow deep in hamburger...He could either call someone to help her, or he would have to take a minute and wash up...
She got so angry because he could not help her "RIGHT THIS SECOND", that she actually threw the turkey threw the service window in the direction of the poor Butcher...
She missed hitting him...Her husband was so embarrassed that he practically dragged her out of the store...
I've always wondered where her penned-up anger came from...could it be that she had eaten so much turkey that it had somehow affected her reasoning skills??? Probably not...I've known plenty of very gentle and kind people who eat a lot of turkey...it still makes me a little uneasy though...
No comments:
Post a Comment