A TURKEY CAME TO THANKSGIVING DINNER
By Don Gardner
It was a difficult to figure out which turkey should have been cooked.
When my buddy Ralph Boole rotated back to the states for discharge, RM2 Taylor arrived to take his place
We radiomen enjoyed a good reputation in Bermuda—all of us had good Morse skills due to a fairly high volume of traffic because of the many SAR events that occurred. The RM-in-Charge advised the district communication officer during his inspection that only RM2's and higher should be sent there because of the high degree of operating skills required.
With somewhat porcine features, I soon learned Taylor enjoyed telling unbelievable lies matter-of-factly. Most unforgivable of all, Taylor was, to be blunt, a shitty Radioman. We were quick to learn he had been promoted to RM2 at Norfolk Radio so they could get rid of him. He was, in radio parlance, a Lid!
But as Thanksgiving approached, in a magnanimous gesture of goodwill—or gross stupidity, I haven’t figured it all out yet—I invited him to spend Thanksgiving dinner with my new wife and me. I would pick him up at the base and return him since he didn’t have a bike or a car.
My wife Charlotte prepared a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner for me and my "friend" and we sat down to eat. Taylor began shoveling food down quickly, belched, and proclaimed, "Pigs do it, no sign humans should do it."
I didn’t think it was funny. The second, third, and fourth time he belched and repeated that statement, it was all I could do to keep from calling him an idiot—but he was our dinner guest and should be treated courteously, I kept telling myself. Before dinner was over I was warmly entertaining the thought of wringing his neck.
A desperate glaze came over Charl’s eyes as she tried to block out the inanities Taylor mouthed.
Suddenly, I was smitten with a Heaven-sent inspiration for which I had been desperately praying for; a parole from our suffering.
"Say, Charl, there’s a great movie at the base. Would you guys like to go?"
By this time in our married life, Charl could read my devious mind and knew I was up to something.
We piled into my 1952 Morris Minor and drove to the base. Officers, chiefs, and married men of all ranks and rates with the families sat in the balcony section, away from the "riffraff" below. Taylor followed us anyway.
The balcony was crowded, but I was lucky. "Charl, there are two seats together over there," and hastily maneuvered her to the center section while Taylor found a seat in the section to our right.
I don’t remember what the movie was, only that it was terrible, one of those British J. Arthur Rank movies, with the emphasis on "rank."
Thirty or so minutes into the movie, Charl and I quietly slipped out of the darkened theatre and returned home. We had suffered enough for one day.
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