Thanksgiving Morning:
Ah, all I have to do today is bake pumpkin bread and corn
muffins. Life is good. My daughter, who
lives next door, is doing ALL of the heavy lifting this year. She baked pies
last night and today is cooking the turkey, all twenty-one pounds of it. This
is going to be the best Thanksgiving ever—
(Mom? Uh, Mommy? My, ummm, my oven is on fire.)
Fire?
(Well, it’s sparking. We shut it off, but it’s still doing
it. We’re going to unplug it now. We called a fireman friend for advice.)
Fireman? We’re on fire?
(No, just the heating element in the oven. But, uh, the turkey just went in and . . . )
I have a small
Alice-Brady-in-the-wall-four-feet-off-the-floor oven. I am not even sure a
twenty-one pound turkey will fit into my oven, and I’m willing to bet I cannot
lift it in and out of the oven to baste it because the stove is against the
outside wall, which means I cannot reach in with both arms to lug the damn bird
across the kitchen.
But Thanksgiving is now in triage. We must save Thanksgiving. We transfer the turkey to my house, change
it into a smaller turkey pan so it fits into the smaller over, then realize the
vented cover will not fit. We wrap the top of the turkey with foil and breathe
collective sighs of relief.
Except now my oven is in use, and all I have left at my fingertips is a small toaster oven. Very small. I can cram the cornbread in, but there is no way I can pull off the pumpkin bread. We can supplement with crescent rolls after the turkey is out, though.
At the first turkey basting, I try to baste the giant bird
without taking it out of the oven, which works until I attempt to replace the
foil. I reach in a little too far and too high and catch the back of my left
ring finger on the upper heating element in my oven. Apparently, heating
elements are not our friends today. I slam the oven door shut and look at the
half-inch hole in my finger, and I say “hole” because I have a chunk missing
from my finger, and the burned area is pure white like ash. I have seen red
burns, even purple ones. I’ve never seen a white burn with a chunk of flesh
missing.
Now we have gone from turkey triage to finger triage. Cold water is fine except anyone who has ever burned himself will attest to the fact that once the burn leaves cold water, the pain is intense. So I run my wet finger from the kitchen faucet to the bathroom faucet and, while holding my hand in the bathroom sink under cold water, I rummage around under the sink with my right hand trying to find the medical cream and band-aids.
