A Thanksgiving heads-up

After my mother passed away in 1993, my family was trying to make the best of things. My daughter had been living with my parents for the years she went to college and had stayed on to help her grandfather after our loss.

They decided that they would host Thanksgiving that year and my son and I would be their guests.

It was the eve of Thanksgiving and I was looking forward to the feast we would have when a startling phone call disturbed my pleasant thoughts. My daughter was, to say the least, unnerved, as she breathlessly told me the details of what had happened.

She was preparing the turkey for cooking by taking the giblet bag out. When she pulled the neck out, the head was still be attached, an eye staring at her like something out of a horror movie. She screamed and flung the head onto the floor.

My father was working out in his garage and when he heard the screams, he came running, thinking she had hurt herself with a kitchen tool. He saw the turkey head and shouted a few expletives that were native to his homeland Norway.

It took some time for my daughter to calm down and my father decided to have a whiskey because he had sustained such a fright at his age. He could have had a heart attack from it all, he said with great fervor.

We did cook that turkey the following day without the head and everything turned out well. We still remember that Thanksgiving and, since then, we take a little caution as we pull out the turkey neck.

--Andrea Dahle Sinnott, East Meadow,