As the blood gushed from my thumb on Thanksgiving morning, I realized that I truly had much to be thankful for.
Yes, thankful that my knife, like its owner, was not the sharpest one in the drawer — cause this was no time to go crying to the emergency room.
First of all, no Pilgrim ever went to no emergency room.
Second, I wasn’t sure if my insurance covered acts of God-forsaken stupidity.
But third and most important, my family was depending on me — they needed those mashed potatoes.
So I was on a mission — despite extremely limited culinary skills and a pulsing self-inflicted gash — to mash that batch of potatoes.
Side note: Since they were my childhood favorite, I have inherited the relatively easy task of whipping up some fresh spuds for holiday feasts. I figure it is yam near the least I can do.
Especially when I think of the true heroes, the loved ones who crank up the stove, shove in a giant headless bird and then hours later pull out a mouth-watering masterpiece — oven-brown, 23-pound, two-feet-around — that is just begging to be gobbled.
Another reason I have been anointed curator of the taters is that my mom absolutely hates it when I offer to rustle up some baked-stuffed salamander giblets, 143-bean salad and minced chinchilla meringue pie or my “world famous” five-alarm corn-pone (winner of a brown ribbon at the Cape Neddick Fair).
She also hates it when, just before the meal, I say stuff like: “Thank you, Lord, for the food we are about to shove into our humble pieholes. And thank you, O Invisible Man in the Sky, for giving us an esophagus, stomach and intestines that we may draw life-sustaining nourishment from your heaping bounty.”
But back to my original point …
About how the experience of hacking my thumb while chopping, boiling and mashing potatoes — swabbing one with Bacitracin, the other with butter — made me feel especially thankful on Thanksgiving morning.
In retrospect, I think that accidentally carving a small hole in my circulatory system freed up the flow from my heart.
So I felt thankful for the crisp cool air as I gazed out my window onto Market Square. Thankful that my mom is now my next-door neighbor and that, together, we would travel just nine-tenths of a mile to my sister’s house.
When we arrived, I felt blessed to be surrounded by family members whose warm embrace is never without needling. (Me: “I made two kinds of potatoes; the Yukons have skins and the Maines have no skins.” Unidentified family quipster: “How can you be sure?”)
And as the brown gold oozed from my sister’s gravy teapot, I felt thankful that I had inherited a playful demeanor that allows me to derive simple pleasures from words like gizzard, dollop and ramekin.
So what is the point of all this? Is it that blood is thicker than red zinfandel or sweet sparkling cranberry water? Yes.
But I guess it’s also a dollop of mashed potatoes as a metaphor for feeling thankful that I need way more than eight fingers and, yep, two thumbs to count all my blessings.
— John Breneman