BuiltWithNOF
Turkey

A Turkey....

By Any Other Name...

Is ....

Dad would sell some of the surplus turkeys when we were living at the farm on West Avenue. On this particular pre-Thanksgiving day, a red haired Gustine Elementary School P.E. teacher bought his turkey and decided to bring its demise there at our farm. Dad was working at Carnation and was unavailable to give his expertise at beheading the turkey, an expertise the teacher obviously lacked. The teacher trussed the bird upon the side of the garage, which was located "down there" between the milk house and the outhouse. The turkey, sensing what his fate was soon to be, flapped its wings vigorously and jerked this way and that, making himself an extremely uncooperative and difficult target. Jordon and I witnessed this scene from behind the haystack, noticing the teacher's growing frustration with the progress of his task. Naturally, as his frustration escalated, his patience dwindled and his anger rose to a point where he unleashed a torrent of profanities that were a blend of regular barnyard utterances and state of the art exclamations that were creatively woven into a continuous stream of vocabulary which, we witnesses observed, effectively expressed his wrath. Being nine years old at the time, our cussing lexicon was limited to just a few short exclamations and that was it. We certainly recognized the usual terms for the Thanksgiving bird, " ... turkey ... and ...gobbler ...", but these new additional exclamations were a revelation! Now standards were raised to a new level! No child left behind! As the the teacher's pride and poise waned, he voiced reinforcement of this new, fascinating language as he struggled valiantly to control the turkey's bobbing and weaving, wings batting furiously at wall and executioner. Sorry, but I won't repeat his stream of expletives because, hey, this is a family newsletter. The struggle between man and bird finally ended, but it was hard to tell which was the worse for wear because there seemed to be as much blood and feathers on the teacher as there was on the turkey.


Besides extending our vocabulary well beyond our weekly school spelling list, we certainly had learned two lessons that day: (1) an appreciation for Dad's ability to separate the turkey's neck with a quick stroke of a sharp hatchet, after first calming it on a wood stump and (2) the discovery that teachers, under the right conditions, have the ability to cuss with the best of 'em!

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