Sally Breslin: My Life: NOPE - NO THANKSGIVING TURKEY FOR ME!

First of all, I want to wish all of my readers a happy, healthy and gut-busting Thanksgiving…one that will force you to loosen your belts or wear sweatpants for a few days afterwards!

I will be staying home with the dogs on Turkey Day this year, by choice. For one thing, I can’t get any of the Covid vaccines due to an allergy to one of the ingredients in them, so I’m not yet eager to mingle. But my biggest reason for staying home, and I have received plenty of negative comments about this…is I don’t like turkey. When I tell people I don’t, they give me the same sort of look they would give someone who’d just made a blatant anti-American statement.

But it hasn’t always been that way. Back when I was growing up, I loved turkey. The mere sight of that plump bird, roasted to golden perfection, sitting on the decorative platter in the center of a beautifully decorated Thanksgiving table, made my mouth water. And then the turkey sandwiches for days afterwards…well, those were even better.

Even as I grew older and went out to lunch with friends, I’d order a turkey club-sandwich or a hot-turkey sandwich. And on my honeymoon, the first meal my husband and I ordered at our hotel was a turkey dinner, complete with mashed potatoes, gravy, and all of the trimmings. Actually, that was because my new husband was a turkey fanatic. He loved turkey with such a passion, he wouldn’t have minded eating it seven days a week. His passion was so strong, I actually toyed with the idea of tossing aside my sexy negligees and wearing a turkey costume on our honeymoon.

Anyway, fast forward about nine years later to my husband’s sister’s wedding. The reception and dinner were going to be held at a fancy restaurant, with a complete turkey dinner as the featured meal. When my husband learned that news, you’d think he’d just won the lottery.

So on the day of the wedding, there we sat with my parents at the beautifully decorated table – fresh flowers, fine china, cloth napkins, crystal goblets and intricately etched silverware – as we eagerly awaited our turkey dinners. When the meal was served, our plates looked like works of art – slices of thick, white meat, a scoop of dressing, a mound of mashed potatoes, several different vegetables, and bowls of gravy on the side. It was a feast for the eyes.

My husband and I dug into our meals. The turkey was moist and tasty, fork tender.

“This is sooo good!” my husband said. “Definitely worth the wait.”

I had to agree, even though I thought the food could have been a bit warmer. I poured more of the hot gravy over my mashed potatoes and turkey to heat them up.

My mother, however, took a bite of the turkey and then, I noticed, she discretely spit it into her napkin. After that, she laid down her fork and sat there, eating only a roll with butter. I asked her what was the matter.

“There’s something wrong with the turkey,” she whispered to me, not wanting the other guests to overhear.

“Mine’s delicious,” I said. “Let me taste yours.”

I did, and so did my husband, and we both agreed it was excellent and my mother was, well…crazy.

“If you’re not going to eat your turkey, then can I have it?” my husband asked her.

“I wouldn’t advise it,” she said.

Ignoring her, he asked me to pass her plate to him. I did, and he scraped off the turkey and mashed potatoes onto his plate.

The meal turned out to be a big hit with everyone…that is, except my mother.

It was about 3 AM the next morning when my husband and I both abruptly awoke, ironically only minutes apart, with severe stomach cramps. We raced each other to the bathroom.

Let’s just say what followed wasn’t pretty…or fun.

The next day, my husband called his mother to see how she’d enjoyed the wedding. She said the wedding had been fine, but she’d been up sick all night. She said his brother also had been ill.

The plot began to thicken.

A few more phone calls later, we found out that just about everyone who’d attended the wedding was sick – a few so severely, they ended up in the hospital. I was writing a newspaper column at the time, so I mentioned the incident in my column that week, leaving out the name and location of the restaurant.

The next day, the state Board of Health contacted me, asking for details…lots of details.

They ended up investigating the restaurant, and interviewing everyone on the wedding’s guest list. The questions they asked each guest were pretty embarrassing, especially for my poor husband, who said he ended up feeling like a glutton. His interview went something like this:

“Did you eat the turkey?” they asked him.

“Yes.”

“The full portion or part of it?”

“Um, two full portions.”

“Gravy?”

“Yes.”

“How much?”

“Half the bowl.”

“Wedding cake?”

“Yes.”

“A full slice or only a few bites?”

“Three slices.”

“Did you have diarrhea?”

“Yes.”

“How many times?”

“I lost count.”

“Would you estimate more than five?”

“Oh, hell, yeah.”

I had to answer the same questions…and so did my mother, whose interview was very brief. When they asked her what she had eaten at the wedding, she said only a roll and butter. Did she get sick? No. So at least they could rule out the roll and butter as the culprits.

After a thorough investigation, the board’s inspectors reported that the turkeys for the dinner had been thawed overnight out on the counters in the kitchen. Then the chef had slow-roasted them at only 135 degrees. So he’d essentially turned them into fertility clinics for salmonella bacteria.

And my poor sister-in-law and her husband, both sick on their Niagara Falls honeymoon, thought it was due to the excitement and jitters from the wedding. Fortunately, seeing that no one had cell phones or Facebook back then, they had no clue what was going on back home while they were away. I don’t think hearing, “Oh, Aunt Zelda is in critical care right now from eating your poisonous wedding meal,” would have enhanced their honeymoon very much.

My husband’s love of turkey, however, wasn’t affected by the incident, and he continued to be a rabid fan of the bird. In fact, when we moved into our new home out in the country and he spotted wild turkeys running across our property, the look in his eyes told me he was picturing them smothered in gravy.

I, on the other hand, can’t even look at a Thanksgiving card without turning green. My turkey-eating days ended at that wedding.

But my husband and I did learn one important lesson on that fateful day. Whenever we went out to eat with my parents after that, we always had my mother sample our food before we ate it.

Our septic tank thanked us for it.

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Sally Breslin is an award-winning syndicated humor columnist who has written regularly for newspapers and magazines all of her adult life. She is the author of several novels in a variety of genres, from humor and romance to science fiction. Contact her at: sillysally@att.net