We’ve all heard it said that “truth is, or can be, stranger than fiction.” I’d like to elaborate on that a bit by adding that it can also be a more humorous than some fiction. It certainly was in this case, and I’m sitting here a few days later still chuckling about it.
It all started quite innocently a few weeks ago when I decided to celebrate Thanksgiving Day by myself this year. For reasons too numerous to list, I simply felt a need to take a break from all the mess and bother, the hot kitchen, the eternal leftovers, and the obligatory and perfunctory niceties that the day usually elicits from those who gather to give thanks. I admit that, at one point, I regretted the decision, and the expected melancholia enveloped me briefly in memories of more glorious and turkey-dripping-infused Thanksgivings past. But that passed quickly as, once again, Nature came to my rescue.
I thought it would be a nice touch to sit at the kitchen table from where I could view the birdfeeder while enjoying my humble repast of a turkey cutlet, boxed stuffing, instant potatoes, frozen corn, and canned gravy. And let’s not forget the cranberry sauce, which was also obtained from a can. (I wasn’t exaggerating when I said I was keeping things simple this year.) Even given this bare-bones celebration, I started feeling overly full about halfway through the meal, and that’s when I looked up and realized that I was not alone.
Just inches away on the other side of the window, a single large unblinking eye gazed in at me through the steamy glass.
Now, at the risk of sounding redundant, I realize that I’ve written before about the large flock of turkeys that lives in the woods behind this apartment complex and of how some of us have gotten into the habit of tossing bread out to them. Over time, the turkeys have come to expect that, to the point where they now come right up to our doors waiting for food. Here, that includes scratching at the ground beneath the bird feeder, which hangs just a foot or so beyond the window. So it’s a pretty common thing now to see them out there, and I generally don’t think much of it unless I happen to look outside to make sure a squirrel isn’t hanging by its hind legs from the bottom of said feeder.
Yesterday, though, that simple every-day event took on a whole new meaning when one of the seven resident Tom turkeys decided to come right up to the window and look inside just as I was enjoying a small piece of what has come to be this particular holiday’s culinary trademark, braised in butter, chicken broth, and a few herbs. Suddenly, it didn’t taste so good anymore, and neither did anything else on my plate. The implication of the moment was not lost on me. For how often do we in life actually sit down to eat meat all the while being observed by the very type of creature it was obtained from?
Of course, the wild turkey (Meleagris gallopavo) is not the most intelligent of creatures. So I think it’s a safe bet that the one peering in through my window yesterday had absolutely no idea what I was eating, let alone what I was even up to. Beyond my connection to the stale bread I toss out there every day, I doubt that I matter all that much to those turkeys. So any conjecturing about what took place here yesterday went on totally on my side of that window, and I have to say that it rates a place on the “Not Something You See Every Day” list. And I’m sure that the only thought, if you can call it that, in that bird’s tiny mind was “What, no bread today?”
Sure, I have my meals at that table often, and it is usually in sight of whatever is out there foraging. On any other day, I would have just looked up and then gone back to what I was doing, which normally includes reading from a book I prop up on the table while I eat. But yesterday was the first time that I and a wild creature got that close and personal to each other. And all because I was consuming what could have been the sautéed remains of one of its millions of distant relatives.
The event could have made a vegetarian convert of me. But that would mean total abstinence from other types of protein products, such as a juicy steak or pork chop, whose sources are not likely to ever be standing outside my window watching me eat. In the end, I decided to see it as Nature supplying me with a Thanksgiving Day “guest” of sorts. Still, on some existential level, I’m glad that turkey had no idea what I was eating.
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