Climbing mountains, talking turkey

I read somewhere that when you’re working on long-term goals, it helps to think of bumps in the road as being part of the path, rather than as problems blocking your way. Like, when you climb a mountain you have to hoist yourself over boulders, or maybe veer off your planned route, even go in reverse for awhile, loop around a bit, head up a different way.  

I was talking with my parents when I said this. I was visiting with them a day after returning from a quick trip to DC. I was explaining that I’d done nothing on my book the last five days except wish I was writing it. Then I got back, and intended to write that very day, but didn't. 

See, that first day back, yesterday, I was starving and I ended up in a carb coma from an overdose of late afternoon snack, which was coffee cake, dough and cooked. I spent the rest of the evening dozing in front of the television as I caught up on my Dexter, Ray Donovan, and Web Therapy episodes. Talk about slippery slopes: First, spending an entire late afternoon and evening watching television, and second, using a possessive pronoun in front of the names of television shows.  

And yet, it seemed more productive than going to bed before dusk. 

The flight had been delayed. I hadn’t eaten much before I arrived home. Just a small turkey wrap early in the morning from a refrigerated bin at the Fresh Harvest fast food counter at the BWI airport terminal. It had been pretty disgusting too, the sandwich I mean. 

As I sat there at the wobbling plastic table watching two six-year-olds chase one another around the chairs in front of me, I couldn’t help but notice that the wrap was moist, which always grosses me out, and the turkey had a bloody iron aftertaste.

I felt like a barbarian. I rarely eat meat these days and when I do prefer it to be bland and anonymous, so  devoid of taste that I never get a whiff or clue of what form it had taken before the beheading, plucking, skinning, deboning, and all those gruesome things that make up the processing that brought this particular critter into pressed and rolled form on the wet thin bread before me. There was lettuce too. It was crispy. 

I ended up eating the whole turkey wrap though I hated myself for every single bite, my stomach churning from the taste as well as from the pictures in my head of turkey processing scenes which I imagined taking place in the cellar of my childhood home, a three-decker on Vernon Hill, the same home my mother grew up in.

My mother once had a pet turkey. My grandfather had grand dreams of being a farmer some day. He spent the first two decades of his life on a tiny farm on a dead end road in a one-intersection town about ten miles outside of Killarney, County Kerry, Ireland.  Think sheep, cows, grass like velvet, drizzle, turf smoke, manure, white plaster walls, tin roofs. Then he moved to Massachusetts and spent the rest of his life, four more decades, working as an electrician, running a bar and living in three-deckers -- wood framed towers, chocolate shingles, columned porches, which in my city are as common as turkeys are not. 

My mother’s three-decker, bounded by a tar driveway and cement sidewalks, had tiny, sloping front and back yards that my grandfather filled up with irises, lilac and hydrangea bushes, hostas, lilies, and those nasty prickly hedges with hard red berries. Like many of his immigrant neighbors, he rented a small plot of land, maybe the size of a couple of Fords, on the opposite side of the tenement-filled hill where they lived, just a quick walk past the Worcester Academy athletic fields, the old red brick St. Vincent’s hospital, down a winding narrow road, to the bottom of Heywood Street.  Once a week, he’d drag the kids there with hoes and shovels and watering cans to weed and care for the family’s cucumbers, tomatoes, lettuce, peas, corn.  

My mother doesn’t remember much about the garden.  But she does remember always making sure to wear her good dress and shoes when they went there, so she had an excuse to not help out.

My mother remembers the turkey, and says he didn’t have a name. I’m figuring he must have had a name. The four of them, my mom and her siblings, were just little kids. Kids name things. It’s part of being a kid. He  -- Tom, Dick, Harry,  lived in the cement-floored cellar of their three-decker, on a street lined with three-deckers in a city that still today prides itself on being the center of the three-decker universe, for three or four months. The first time I heard that my mother had owned a turkey, I thought it was the neatest news ever.  

My mother says it was actually quite unpleasant. He pooped everywhere, made lots of noise, and was stinky. My grandmother hated him. The kids hated him. We assume it was a him, though my mom isn’t totally sure.  My mom doesn’t remember what happened to dear old Oswald or Howard or Christopher or Balthazar or whatever. She swears that her father did not kill the turkey and they did not eat the turkey. But she doesn’t know what happened to him. I bet she and her siblings ate the turkey, but never knew it as their smelly shrieking Elmer.  

I wasn’t thinking about my mother’s turkey at all today when I was over their house telling my parents about bumps in the road and getting off track and that I was ready to get moving on my book. 

“That’s a good way of looking at it,” my dad said, about my whole bumps in the road philosophy and the mountain metaphor that I came up with as a way to explain.

My mother cackled. “Why bother going up the mountain? Why not go down it? Nice and smoothly. Ski it. Why even bother going out there to the mountain? Why not just admire it from the window? Like from a ski lodge? Or stay at home and look at it on a calendar.”

“You mean like on that calendar with all the cows?” I said. “Like the one with the cow in the foreground and the mountain in the background? Like that St. Patrick Mountain in your cows of Ireland calendar?”

“Yes.  Mount Kilpatrick in the background.” She nodded her head. “That would be lovely.”

What I meant to say when I started writing this was that I took a week off from the book and I’m ready to get back to it today. But I wanted to write about the mountain before I forgot, because my parents say the weirdest things and I don’t want to forget them. By them I mean their words, and them. 

I think I’ll hit the gym first, then start revising the book. I thought I’d be more productive just now. Or maybe moving forward doesn’t always look like moving forward, right?