Dark Kermit and Fried Turkeys

Years ago, Grant was a freshman at Silver Lake Regional High School. Midway through the season, he was called up to the varsity to play defensive line. This meant that he got to ditch halftime band performances where he was supposed to play clarinet. He saw a lot of action in the Thanksgiving game, which was a blowout win over arch rival Pembroke. That afternoon, I told him that he would need to train hard for the coming year, that even as a sophomore, the team would probably rely on him to start on both offensive and defensive lines, that he should get started early in his training since a lot of guys wouldn’t be willing to do that.

At seven am the next morning, I felt a presence in the doorway of our bedroom. Surely no one was up, right? The one day out of the year I could sleep in?

“Dad?” Pause. “Dad? Pause. “Dad?”

“What, Grant?”

“Are you awake?”

“I am now.”

“So do you want to go to the gym?”

I took a deep breath. “Sure, but is there any chance at all we could wait till, say, ten am?”

“Oh. I guess that’s ok. Sorry, Dad.”

Here we are eight years later, and at seven am on Thanksgiving morning, his brother Graham was the first out of bed. Why? He had to get his run in, and since he had to be at the school for band at 9:15 am, he had to get up early enough. He will be up early again on Friday to run because he has to work at eleven am. Not being a varsity football player, he did have to fulfill his band obligation. So we bundled up and headed to the Lake where Lauren took this selfie. She says that I “look like Dark Kermit the Frog.”

We watched Graham do his band thing. He’s the trumpet near the center of the picture. Looks great, right?

Well, as we rode home, we were talking about the band’s performance and Graham said, “Not gonna lie, Dad. I basically wasn’t playing.”

“Um, what?”

“My trumpet was mostly frozen, so I just pretended to play.”

Sigh. Strangely, the rest of the band was also performing in the forty-degree weather and their instruments were not frozen. When you ask Graham about stuff like that, he just looks at you, so in this case, I didn’t.

“Well, it’s not that different from his career in church children’s choir numbers,” said Lauren. True. He would go up for Mother’s Day, and the rest of the kids would sing their hearts out. Graham would chew some gum and move his lips now and again.

The Thanksgiving meal went well. I did the oven roasted turkey, and I fried a turkey as well. The fried turkey looked spectacular and tasted great.

Dobby feasted on giblets and sweet potatoes.

I tweaked my back in a workout with Lindsay the day before Thanksgiving, and all the turkey labor worsened it, so I told her, “I don’t know what your workout plan is tomorrow, but if it involves weights, I can’t do it. I need to rest this back.”

Graham then chimed in, “Well, Dad, you could get on a bike and ride in front of me as a wind break.”

“I’m sorry, what?”

“For my run in the neighborhood. Since you can’t lift with Lindsay, you could ride a bike in front of me as a wind break.”

“Dude, I’m not going to be your freaking windbreaker.”

“Daaaad, I have no training partners. It will be like having a training partner. Except you can actually do it since you can’t run with me.” If you’re missing the subtlety here, it’s not that I can’t run—it’s that I can’t possibly run fast enough to keep up with Graham.

Pro tip, kids: your chances of getting your parents to help you increase when you are not (1) implicitly insulting them and (2) demanding that they do a menial, pointless task so that your comfort level is elevated from a nine to a ten.

“I don’t see myself doing that,” I said finally.

“Well, can you at least not forget to buy me new running shoes tomorrow?”

Hmm . . . this might have been the play all along. His running shoes are destroyed from cross country, so we have to get him new shoes. Doing so has not been the top of the priority list this week, though, so he might very well be negotiating by moving us from a ridiculous demand to a more reasonable position. Don’t put it past this kid.