A Quickie Dinner, Followed by a Flying Beer

Thanksgiving dinner. A typically thankless chore, performed mainly by Tabitha. Three days of grocery shopping and turkey ordering and stuffing preparation, six hours of actual cooking. But from the exact moment they are asked to sit down, the four children at the table -- ages 7, 5, 5 and 2 -- all want to leave. To prevent the dinner ending before it begins, someone suggests that the 7-year-old recite a poem by Robert Louis Stevenson that she has recently memorized for school. So she does, until she stumbles, forgets the final couplet and breaks down into mysterious and uncontrollable sobs.

"Wait, wait, wait," some other grown-up says, in an attempt to distract her from her misery and make this a Thanksgiving to be proud of. "Let's all go around the table and say what we are thankful for."

As we do, the children push their food idly around on their plates. The moment we have run out of ideas for things to be thankful for, all four of them rise and make a dash for the playroom. The dinner has lasted exactly 9 1/2 minutes.

After dinner, we head off to the local park. There we run into a good friend of Tabitha's, along with her dreaded husband. This is the problem with letting your wife go off and make friends of her own: Their husbands become your problem. This chap presents special difficulties because he is so relentlessly nice. It's deeply unfair for me to be so relentlessly miserable in his company, as he does nothing even the slightest bit offensive. He is always chipper and upbeat and friendly -- which of course makes my longing to escape him even more unforgivable. Immoral, even.

"Did you have a great Thanksgiving?" he asks brightly when I see him. "Yes," I say. "It lasted 9 1/2 minutes."

"It's my favorite holiday!" he says. As usual, I can't think of what to say next, and the conversation dies.

A red-eye from San Francisco to Newark. I get off the plane, race to Giants Stadium, spend the day interviewing pro football players for a magazine article, then drive back to a hotel room with a panoramic view of the New Jersey Turnpike. There, bleary-eyed, I channel-surf. At length I come upon the very end of what appears to be a boring basketball game between the Detroit Pistons and the Indiana Pacers.