Love hurts, my turkey friend. We love you so. Hence, we eat you.

Hey, Thanksgiving wouldn’t be the same without the Great Annual Turkey Massacre. Fortunately Troy and Eric were both given a presidential pardon – How could you not expect me to watch the “Shibboleth” episode of The West Wing today? – but poor Mr. Butterball was religiously devoured here on the home front.

Relatives of Indeterminable Relation braved the cold earlier to come over, as did Friendly Neighbor Who Gives Me Cookies, so I really can’t argue with that. The kids ate too much pie, apparently really like corn, and hadn’t watched “Cars” yet, so that is what we did. It started snowing about halfway through the movie – Nick exclaimed “Wow! The angels must be throwing down some of God’s dandruff!” (well, he said all of that up until the “dandruff” part and I made up the rest) – and it really is doing something to me now. The white stuff always makes me musive, especially during the first snowfall of the season.
Today, since a long while ago, I felt content. My mind wasn’t wandering, and I didn’t feel bogged or befuddled. I really have hated being twenty-one this past month-and-a-half and felt incredibly lost and aimless. It’s like being a crusty old sea captain named Jim and having your barnacle-encrusted compass  snatched away and eaten by rabid, foaming-at-the-mouth mermaids – just like that! Except, you know, without the crustiness, oldness, barnacle-encrusted compass and rabid-foaming-at-the-mouth mermaids. I’m writing a new short film called “Herman’s Heroes,” not realizing when I started it earlier this fall just how cathartic it would prove to be. In it the main character, Sam, is a junior high kid who, through a remarkable series of unfortunate events, basically manages to banish his unfair history teacher to the school basement – and now he’s being called to be just the one thing he’s stopped believing in – a superhero.  It’s a story, at its core, about reconciling the things of childhood with growing up. It’s a bit about realizing that not only are there some things worth holding on to as we grow up, but life is better, fuller, and more vibrant when we do. That’s a journey, I now strongly believe, that old wandering me really needs to go on.

So as I’m writing Sam, and his friends Linus and Ellen, and Mr. Herman (the toothless and ancient math teacher who’s been trapped in the basement as well for over fifty years), I’m really writing myself and the road I never consciously took but am now realizing I’ve wandered over to. It’s a bit scary (since I don’t usually write so personally) and a bit preposterous (since I can’t ever imagine writing well enough to capture everything) but also tranquilizing in every way of the word. It’s helping me to realize just how I can still be a little kid in a grown-up world, especially how I can realize the joy God has lined up for his kids.
Of course living all of that out is much easier said than done… I suppose that’s what I liked about today – it had that nostalgia that the holidays when I was a kid had. For today at least, adulthood didn’t win. That’s certainly a big victory for junior high, underpants-clad superheroes everywhere in my book.

So as one feathery fiend is eaten, another one takes flight. Today might be Oppressed Turkey Day – and will bear a mass genocide of turkeys the likes of which we’ve never seen – but it’s a good day to me. There just might be a light down in the basement.