When You Give A Feast...

Yesterday we drove to the Thanksgiving feast at Jennifer & Pat’s new home.

We’d been invited to celebrate with Pat’s family. About 20 or 30 people showed up. The girls had set up tables in the yard by the pool to accommodate the crowd. They are all wonderful people and I really tried to be sociable, but being so shy and so fearful of being seen eating in public, I made myself a plate of goodies and slipped in the garage to hide and eat my meal.

On the drive over there, Ginny and I got to reminiscing and laughing about former thanksgiving days in our own home.

Years ago we’d read the words of Jesus in Luke 14:12-13 where He said, “When you give a banquet, invite the poor” etc. He said that people who do this will be blessed, or happy.

So, for ages at Thanksgiving or Christmas as part of our normal family preparation for the feast, we’d go out and pick up a hitchhiker or homeless guy and bring them home to share the feast with our family. Our kids have carried on this tradition by bringing in foreign students stranded at college with nowhere to go for the holidays, etc.

A funny thing happened the first time Ginny and I tried this. It was back in the early ‘70s when Jennifer was just a babe in arms and we were abjectly poor ourselves. In fact some church folks have given us a food basket weeks before Thanksgiving and we’d eaten all of it except for a bird, which we thought was a chicken, and some green beans and corn.

This was the only food we had left in our house except for some baby food jars (As I recall they were named High-Meat Dinners and made for the worst smelling poop in history!)

We did not have a car at the time and we’d walked pushing the baby stroller to a corner church for services and on our walk back home, we met this bum who said he was broke and hungry and could we give him a few dollars for something to eat.

Well, we did not have even a dollar, but we invited him home with us for the chicken dinner. At the time, we ate off a card table which Ginny had covered with a white cloth. She put out our best china. She had baked this bird on a timer setting while we were at services. She cooked the corn and green beans.

The three of us sat down to eat with the baby in her highchair at the table.

We said a blessing.

Ginny placed the bird in golden perfection in the center of the table. It appeared to have a golden glaze on the breast.

Then she started to carve the bird.

She had trouble.

The knife would not cut it.

The bird, though it appeared perfect, had the consistency of rubber. Our guest bum said it was not a chicken but a duck. He tried to cut off a drumstick. He could not pierce the skin. Apparently, whoever had given the bird to us had once frozen it then let it thaw and then frozen it again.

Thinking that if we held it firmer, Ginny would be able to slice it, the guy took one leg of the duck and I took the other and we pulled while Ginny tried to cut a leg off.

The legs stretched to an impossible length and Ginny sawed like mad but we could not penetrate the golden glazed skin. When the guy and I let go, like a chunk of rubber tire, the bird snapped back together again.

The three of us started laughing.

Here we had this golden duck which looked and smelled delicious and which could not be sliced under any circumstances. I mean a chainsaw would not cut this duck!

We laughed and we laughed and we laughed and tears streamed down our faces and we laughed some more.

We gave up on the bird and feasted on corn and green beans alone.

When it came time for him to leave, the bum said to me, “Mister, I lied to you when I said I was broke. I’ve got ten dollars here and I wants you folks to have it”. He slipped the money into my hand saying, “This was the best Thanksgiving meal I ever had”.

We ate off that man’s ten dollars for another week.

Thanks be to God.