A Rinkydink Thanksgiving

         Aunt Beatrice always cooked fantastic Thanksgiving dinners.  It was the only time the Rinkydinks weren’t muttering and jabbering at each other over pesky minute details.  The only sounds at the dinner table were the chomping of teeth (or dentures in Gramma and Grampa’s case) the scraping of forks, and the sickening sound of Uncle Phil licking gravy and turkey bits off his plate with his bumpy grayish tongue. 
         Uncle Phil acted on a tight instinctual impulse.  Everyone else at the table wanted to do what he was doing, but they held themselves back because it was the “proper thing to do,” as Benjamin Rinkydink would say. 
         Sometimes Synthia Rinkydink would think that Uncle Phil was better off the way he was, but after a short glance and a sudden loss of appetite she made it her business to do the exact opposite of everything he did.
         Synthia and Benjamin’s twin sons Mikey and Fred giggled to themselves at the Rinkydink family antics, their eyes red and hazy after one of their secret trips to the car as they scarfed down just about anything they could get their hands on.
         After a dinner filled with turkey, mashed taters, green bean casserole, a jiggly cranberry sauce cylinder and Aunt Beatrice’s famous sausage stuffing, the Rinkydinks took to the living room and sat by crackling heat of the stone hearth to listen to Mikey and Fred perform an acoustic guitar duo that included Grateful Dead’s Franklin’s Tower, The Rolling Stones’ Dead Flowers, and even a little Bon Jovi to the dismay of everyone except for the the entertainingly odd Cousin Marge.  From that point on, Marge assumed all songs played by Mikey and Fred were Bon Jovi songs.
         “Is that Bon Jovi?” she asked at the conclusion of every song, and eventually everyone started telling her that it was in fact Bon Jovi, just to get her to be quiet.  This, of course, did not work in the slightest bit.
         As the night steadied on in an increasingly drunken haze, the laughs became more genuine and the awkwardness that seems to surround family gatherings was whisked away out of the room like a slow motion ghost. 
         Oh, if you could have only seen the big wide smiles on Gramma and Grampa’s faces as they watched their grandchildren pluck away at their guitars, and the way Marge clapped her fat flat palms together in mechanical form while Aunt Beatrice puttered around the kitchen with Synthia following close behind asking “Are you sure you don’t need any help with anything?” while stacking dirty plates from the table next to the sink. 
         Uncle Phil snored loudly in his favorite maple rocking chair with a lazy drop of drool steadily flowing out of his half-opened mouth onto his khaki suspenders holding his chest-high tan colored corduroys.
         Benjamin Rinkydink stood for his fifth helping of wine, and nearly fell flat to the floor, which could have been disastrous, or embarrassing at any rate for him.  Had Synthia seen this, she would have fallen to the floor herself in wild hysterics, because for some reason the funniest thing in her book of comical occurrences was an unexpected tumble.  By no means was she a cruel person, as she would always hold laughter until after the tumblers well-being is confirmed.
         Luckily for Benjamin, nobody saw, and he was able to make it to the bottle of wine without so much as a stumble.  He filled his cup and took it back to his chair with the glass cradled in his hand close to his subtle potbelly as he sat down, letting out a long comfort-filled sigh as he slowly parked his ass onto his favorite leather chair, and just as he did this Aunt Beatrice poked her head into the living room and asked “Who wants coffee?”
         Uncle Phil snorted loudly, halfway opened one of his eyes and slowly lifted his veiny wrinkled hand in the air and mumbled “yup,yup,yup,” in his cranky crusty voice, then shut his eye again and immediately was back into snore mode.
         “Well, Mom,” Marge said in her slow high pitched spine tingling tone, “I can only have some coffee if it is going to be the decaf because if I drink the one that is-that is-that is - is -”
         “Caffeinated?”
         “Yes.  Yes.  Do you have the kind that isn’t-that isn’t-that isn’t -”
         “Caffeinated.”
         “Mmhmm,” Marge said, “yup, that isn’t that -”
         “We have decaf, honey.”
         “Well I don’t think I want to have any honey in mine but thank you for asking, I think that the honey is too-too-too-” Marge’s face slowly grew tomato red, something that happened when she was upset, and the frustration at her inability to get her words out correctly projected through those strangely childlike baby blue eyes.
         Fred could see from across the room that she was about to cry, and once that started it wouldn’t stop.  Marge had a tendency to find a reason to cry at every family holiday event, and by now they had learned the warning signs well and knew exactly how to handle the situation.  It was up to the person that noticed it first that had the duty of quickly changing the subject, or throwing out any kind of distraction that they had in the arsenal.  It was at this moment of realization when Fred spontaneously started playing the notes to “Living on a Prayer” on his guitar and immediately those Marge’s sad lost eyes grew bright, and soon enough her frustration was forgotten.
         Halfway through the song, Fred’s mother called from the kitchen.  “All the desserts are ready!” 
         Fred was more than happy to stop playing, and was slightly disturbed by the fact that a Bon Jovi song lived somewhere in a dark corner of his subconscious.
         “Coffee’s ready too,” Aunt Beatrice said as she poked her head back into the room, and after shaking her head with disapproval ironed on her heavily made up leathery face, she walked up to Uncle Phil and smacked him in the side of the head with the back of her hand, making a loud SLAP that echoed through the room so loud that it seemed to have jolted everyone out of their joyful daydreams. 
         The only person who didn’t seem to notice (or care) was Uncle Phil.  Sure, he might have heard her.  He may have felt the force of her five fingers and the scrapes of her long fake green-painted fingernails on the side of his cheek, but he was going to get up when he wanted to get up, dammit, and so he waited a little while longer for everyone to migrate into the kitchen.  He didn’t stand up until he heard the sound of forks clanking.  That sound always made Uncle Phil hungry, and his mouth watered as he stood and walked into the kitchen.  He took no notice to the large drool spot slightly resembling the outline of Alaska on his shirt and suspenders.
         More laughter was shared at the dinner table as the family reminisced on embarrassing moments of their pasts.  The sweet pumpkin pie made Mikey’s taste buds dance while Marge sipped her coffee (hold the honey and the caffeine) loudly with her wide wild eyes shifting rapidly back and forth, until finally Uncle Phil yelled at her to “Stop drinking it like a child!” with a mouthful of Synthia’s famous Pecan Pie in his stinky humid pallet.  Gramma softly hummed to herself, alternating between stirring her spoon in the her coffee mug with a picture of the White House and stacking cookies into towers of three on her plate - one for sugar cookies, another for the chocolate chip, and a third for the oatmeal raisin.  Grampa shamefully shoveled chocolate chip pie into his mouth while saying “I probably shouldn’t be doing this, being diabetic and all, but Thanksgiving only comes but once a year.”  Synthia gazed around the table in a daze thinking, isn’t it so nice that we can all be together for the holidays while Benjamin was thinking, I hope the Bengals beat the Jets tonight.  Fred thought how great it was going to be to make one of those leftover Thanksgiving dinner sandwiches the next day, and Mikey who thought of nothing in particular managed to eat triple the amount of anyone at the table in a third of the time.
         After dessert was finished, everyone said their goodbyes and a feeling of rejuvenation resonated within all of the Rinkydinks (except Uncle Phil, who could care less).  Another year had passed, but as time had proven itself to fly in stealth mode, they all knew that next Thanksgiving would sneak up on them once again.