Next year if I am still alive (questionable -- serious asthma, often exercised induced, and I'm in training as a Willy-legged Mountaineering Water Bottle Cyclist, the fiercest athlete there is), I will make a really great wish and yank the merrythought.
Today, I came across a new word. Merrythought. Yes, it's antiquated. It's British: It's the furcula of a fowl.
It's the wishbone.
The whole wishbone deal is pretty gross if you think about it. Like a lot of Thanksgiving-celebrating kids, I'd stalk the kitchen windowsill for days, waiting for that nasty bone to dry and get all brittle so I could snap the bigger piece, pack my bags and head for Disney, leaving my sister heartbroken with the tinier shard just a splinter in her palm.
I took the wishbone thing seriously. Very seriously.
It was a symbol of hope, a sign of thanksgiving, not the actual meal or day, but the wonder of opening your home and hearth to others and nourishing souls.
But, it was also a power-struggle. Struggling over that jagged grey bird bone is a primal contest, something I could see Dwight Shrute and Cousin Mose fighting over to the very end, marking the days of harvest at Shrute Beet Farms.
And I get that. On a day meant to cherish your beloveds, I'd be up in my bedroom running in place doing thigh slaps getting ready to watch my sister's dreams plummet like dying stars.
The wishbone-breaking game has been around since the days of Plymouth Rock. Birds were believed to carry the gift of foresight under their wings. Modernfarmer.com says, "Whenever the Etruscans slaughtered a chicken, they would harvest its wishbone and set it out in the sun to dry (in hopes of preserving the chicken’s divine powers). Passerby would then pick up the bone in order to hold it in their hands and softly stroke it while making wishes upon it. This is where the wishbone gets its modern-day name."
(No matter how many times I read that passage, I can't get past "softly stroke." Beautifully lliterative, and so grossly perverse. Nice work.)
Anyhow, the wishbone...it's such a homely little tool -- hideous, unstable, and rotting with mystery.
Does it have a rival? Does it have an ugly-twin - like a tossup between Kristen Bell's sloth-cry, Farrah Abraham's everything about being an ungrateful teenage slut-cry, and Kim K.'s painful looking attempt at emotion?
Perhaps a turkey's talon found underfoot in a dark, moss-covered forest, then left in someone's pocket for a week until it's put through the washer and dryer, on the hottest cycle, then had a string attached and hung on the Christmas Tree
Anyway, Thanksgiving, or any other holiday, doesn't have to suck. Just find the madness in it.
Yank that bone!
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