The Cough Drop - A Thanksgiving Miracle

Bill and I were sitting in that special kind of traffic jam that comes just before the holidays and is the result of a small town growing like an overdose victim of Jack’s magic beans, leaving mundane things like convenience and city planning behind.

The roads were packed like the straw in a peach milkshake. Fruit gets stuck in the end, all movement stops, and nobody gets any relief. With a milkshake you can pull out the straw and suck out the peach pulp. With overburdened roads, the obvious answer is to block off one lane with orange cones and commit to a ten-year construction project.

We'd dropped our kids off at a mega-bookstore at what seemed like a short time earlier, doling out the last bite-sized candy bars from Halloween left in the bottom of my pocketbook to hold them until we got back and could hit a nearby buffet extravaganza. Sometimes eating out, even with two teenaged mouths to feed, is a better idea than a sound investment plan.

In the meantime, the Highway Patrol issued an all-points-bulletin to every mall-bound traveler in the area, describing our location, destination, and current state of irritability. That’s the only reasonable explanation for the fact that our car began to attract morons like a pan of biscuits attracts men named Bubba.

Traffic stalled and Christmas shoppers begin to share the joy of the season with their fellow travelers one finger at a time. I attempted to retain my normal good nature even though Bill was getting testy. He always gets that way when he misses snack time.

Bill: Do you have any more candy in your pocketbook?

Me: Why? Are you hungry?

Bill: No, I thought I would toss some out the window to lure people out of our lane.

Me: You’re being sarcastic because you’re too hungry. (Pointing across six lanes of stationary traffic.) There’s a Wendy’s. And a Chinese buffet. And a pizza place. I'll bet that gas station has candy bars.

Bill: Are you hungry?

Me: (Fumbling through my pocketbook.) No. Why do you keep bringing it up? Look--there’s that place with the wonderful barbecue ribs. I could walk there and back before you got to the red light.

(I find a cellophane-wrapped object which I pull surreptitiously from my bag. I wince as a tiny crinkling sound gives me away.)

Bill: What’s that?

Me: Nothing.

Bill: What is it?

Me: Nothing. Leave me alone, willya?

Bill: You have food.

Me: No I don’t. It’s a cough drop. (Here I wave the cough drop with a flourish. It’s of a nondescript color somewhere in between magenta and pink eye.)

Bill: I want half.

Me: It’s mine. I found it. (I fondle the cough drop like it was the One Ring.)

Bill: We can take turns licking it.

Me: (Pensively) I don’t think I’ve bought any cough drops this season. . .not since I had the flu that year we had the big snow.

Bill: You can have it.

Me: No you. I can wait.

Bill: I can wait, too.

We laughed together, the warm laughter of two people coming together over misfortune.

Under cover of laughter, I shucked the paper off the cough drop like it was a peel and eat shrimp and popped it in my mouth.

Just then, in a holiday miracle moment, traffic parted like the men’s restroom line for a father-daughter combination. Nothing clears the tracks like a man doing daddy-duty with a lace-clad toddler in tow. We picked up the boys, and wheeled into a nearby restaurant.

Bill: See, it all turned out okay because we made sacrifices and worked together. That’s what Thanksgiving is all about.

We all smiled at each other like the Brady Bunch on the 29th minute of a 30 minute show. Secretly, I gave thanks for a cough drop appetizer that kept me from acting like a turkey.

Green Acres

I thrive on civilization. If I get more than half an hour from a mall, I go into withdrawal and require a whiff of Estee Lauder’s free gift to bring me to my senses. To get my shopping fix when traveling, I’ve been known to pull over at all-night drugstores and check out the sale on cough drops. People close to me understand that if I don’t have access to a restaurant with a dessert cart at least once a week, police action may be required.

So how did a nice city girl like me end up in Farm Town?

The closest I’ve ever come to crop rotation is sending my cotton socks through the spin cycle.

I was hard at work one afternoon, trying to figure out how to send a Coffee Smiley to 70 of my closest friends on Facebook when up popped a memo.

“Your sister gave you a pig.”

Excuse me?

Give me barbecued ribs, butterflied pork chops, or a crown roast. Don’t bother me with livestock unless they’re trading them for Red Lobster coupons or gold bricks at the Fort Knox outlet store.

After further investigation I discovered that my own sister, the sister who wore a silver sparkly gown to the 1968 Christmas ball and refuses to get a dog because that’s one more place she has to set for dinner, was plowing virtual farmland like she was digging for dollar sweaters on the clearance table.

I investigated her little piece of potato plantation. She was about to sell her spuds at the market for enough money to keep her in hash browns for years to come. Pretend potato money is just about the same as what I’m stashing in my piggy bank these days anyway, so I signed up for a farm of my own.

In real life, my gross household product is mold on the cheddar. Here was a chance to win friends, pick produce, and while away an afternoon I would normally spend overwatering the cactus.

So this little piggy went to market.

By the end of the week, I had enough livestock to fill an ark, I'd grown fruit trees laden with bounty, and my crops rotated like Shakira’s hips.

Meanwhile my family was living on a steady diet of frozen peas and Spam jelly. When my son asked me for his lunch money I snapped, "You'll have to wait for market price like everybody else." I found myself scheduling bathroom breaks around my harvesting schedule.

So in the end, I had to give up my farm and say goodbye to my amber waves of grain.

Once the American dream interferes with the natural flow of things, something’s gotta give.

But I’m keeping the pig. Times are tough and you never know when Fort Knox is going to open that outlet store.

Or when you’ll get a craving for barbecued ribs.