A Man, The Plan, and How Bambi Nearly Wrecked Thanksgiving

My family had Thanksgiving down to a science.

Which is to say, my mother had Thanksgiving down to a science.

A science broken down into a multi-page planning document broken down into half-hour increments starting three days before Thanksgiving Day itself.

Our jobs - my father’s, my sister’s and mine - were primarily Being Helpful, and barring that, Staying Out Of The Way.

When we were young, my father would take my sister and me to the Thanksgiving Day Parade, affectionately known to us (as to many of our region) as the Macy Day Parade. As we got older, my dad settled into a different Thanksgiving day tradition; he’d set up the turkey outside (his one culinary responsibility) using our barbecue as a smoker, and then spend the bulk of the day taking his last motorcycle ride of the season and preparing the bike for winter.

My sister and I preferred generally to stay Out Of The Way while my mother ran the kitchen on her clock, but would be occasionally pressed into table-setting or potato-peeling service.

Our sometime-in-the-early-2000s Thanksgiving was setting up to be a standard affair: mom’s five-page schedule was posted on the fridge, Dad had the early coals going, and my sister and I slept in. By the time I got up, the turkey was already in the smoker, my mom’s prep was underway, and Dad was getting ready to ride. I gave him a wave as he headed out, and went inside to see if I could, at last, reach the status of Being Helpful.

I think my mom started me on some simple task, but I don’t really remember the twenty minutes before the phone rang. My mom grabbed it, probably thinking it was one of the cousins or her parents, who were expected for dinner that night. I didn’t pay attention to the tone of her voice or what she was saying until I heard her shout, “WHAT?!”

I looked up to see her frantically charging out of the kitchen, out the front door, and up the block, still in her house clogs and apron.

She didn’t get far. The phone lost signal once she was a hundred feet from the house. Mom whirled around like she'd reached the end of a bungee cord and zinged back inside.

“A deer hit Dad,” was the first thing she said that did not compute.

“Do you mean he hit a deer?”

“No, I mean a deer hit him. He was heading down Maple Ave when a deer shot out of the woods and ran headlong into him and knocked the bike over.” She took her apron off and started pulling her sneakers on. “Go get my purse and my cell phone.” I hurried to unplug her phone from its charger - she had one of the new flip phones that folded up when you finished the call.

“...is he okay?”

“He’s awake but we’re going to the hospital to get him all checked out. The ambulance will take him now and I’ll meet him there with the car.” She finished tying her shoes and looked up at me. “You’re going to have to take over. Who knows how long we’ll be there?”

I faltered. “I know literally nothing about -”

“You know enough. And you have The Plan. Just follow the plan. Get your sister to help. And DO NOT, under ANY circumstances -”

“I know, I know. Don’t tell Grandma and Grandpa about the accident.” My mother’s parents, who lived just ten minutes from us, were no big fans of Dad’s motorcycle. Telling them about this would ensure that none of us kids ever got another ride. Not to mention probably give Grandma a heart attack.

Mom grabbed her phone and left. I called my sister down and we looked at The Plan. It was almost 1pm, so I flipped to the page that started at 12:30. Boil sweet potatoes, prepare salad, and check on the turkey. We could do that.

We worked our way through two half-hour increments of The Plan without any disasters. At 2pm, my mother called from the parking lot of the hospital. Dad was okay - okay enough that they were going to have to wait a long time while all the real emergencies got priority. They were going to be there for awhile.

“Did you boil the sweet potatoes, start salad, and check on the turkey?” she asked.

“Did you MEMORIZE every single set of instructions?” I answered.

“Of course,” she said as if I were silly for asking. “Are you doing okay? You didn’t tell your grandparents anything, did you?”

“No!” I squawked indignantly. “We’re doing fine.”

“Okay,” she said. “I’ll call you back in half an hour.”

“You don’t have -” I started to say, but before I finished, the phone cut off.

I went back to the kitchen. My sister had already started on the next set of instructions. I went out to the grill to check on the turkey without having the faintest clue what I was checking for. The smoker/grill was warm, and the turkey turning golden, so I shrugged and figured we were okay. I went back inside and tackled the next task: cubing bread for stuffing.

Cubing? I had no idea what that meant. We weren’t yet in the era of googling everything. I knew the set of encyclopedias on the living room shelf wouldn’t help. Checking the cookbooks didn't even occur to me. I knew of only two people who could help, and one of them was trapped in an emergency room with no cell service.

I took a deep breath and dialed.

“Grandma?”

“Hi, sweetie! What’s up?”

“Hi, I’m helping Mom with dinner and she told me to go cube the bread. Any idea what she meant by that?”

“Why don’t you ask her?”

“I…” I faltered, thinking I should’ve definitely come up with an explanation BEFORE I dialed. “I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Um, because she’s in the bathroom and she said nobody should bother her.”

My grandmother chuckled and explained how to cut the bread into little squares. “Tell her not to worry so much,” she advised me. “Your mother always gets stressed around the big holidays, but it always comes out okay.”

You have no idea, I thought. “I’ll tell her,” I promised, then hung up and started slicing bread.

My mother called us every half hour to make sure we were following The Plan, but my questions mostly came up in the interim. I called my grandparents with increasingly ridiculous explanations as to why my mother couldn’t tell me how to slice an avocado, (“She’s checking on the turkey outside and won’t tell me,”) what she meant by “stewing the cranberries” (“She’s in the shower and said I’m on my own”) and whether, just as a matter of opinion, they thought my mother would have a preference over serving white or red wine with dinner (“I want to surprise her!”)

They played along, but sounded increasingly skeptical with every call.

By 4pm, my mother informed us that she and my dad would be home for dinner, but later than my grandparents and cousins. “I guess you can tell them, now that we know Dad’s going to be fine and didn’t break anything,” she said.

Just as she finished that sentence, the front door opened. Only two sets of grownups in the world had that key: my parents, who were stuck in the ER, and my grandparents. My grandmother rushed into the kitchen as I hung up the phone, face pinched with worry.

“All right, enough,” she said firmly. “Where is your mother?”

I knew enough at that age to begin with the important part.

“Okay, Grandma, before I tell you anything else, you just need to know that EVERYTHING IS FINE. EVERYONE IS OKAY.”

She crossed her arms and glared at me. I put a rush on the rest of the explanation, hoping she would save the explosion for the end of it.

“Dad had a little accident, and they needed to go get him checked out, but everything’s fine and they’ll be home in a couple of hours.”

I couldn’t tell from her expression whether I was about to get scolded, or if she was planning to save it for my father, but before she could say anything, my grandfather came into the kitchen and said, “We didn’t think your mother would spend all day in the shower and refusing to tell you how to slice an avocado. We thought maybe you could use some help.”

At that moment, the doorbell rang, followed by the sounds of my aunt, uncle and cousins. They’d heard about what happened and had planned to come a little early to help us finish up the meal so my grandparents would be none the wiser. With all six of us on the job, the last hour and a half of mom’s Great Thanksgiving Plan was done in forty-five minutes.

By the time my parents came home from the hospital, my father bruised, bandaged, and shaken but more or less okay, the story of the Deer Hitting Dad had been told several times. Everyone politely overlooked my many cooking errors and misinterpretations of The Plan. In the end, it was one of the most memorable Thanksgivings we had ever pulled off - thanks to The Plan, The Deer, and my incredibly bad lying.

My father pulled through unscathed, other than a seething hatred of deer that lasts to this day. Much to my grandmother’s chagrin, he restored the motorcycle and continued to take his Thanksgiving Day rides - though he always slowed down a bit whenever he got near the woods.