"That's Not Food!"

The sound of ominous gobbling filled the skies, and I buried my face deeper into my jacket collar.  The school bus would drop my daughter off at any moment, but I was preoccupied. My stance at the corner was a cower, my nervous gaze darting left to right.  The wild turkeys were on the move.  The gobbles bounced off the trees and homes, off the eight broke down cars in the driveway of the corner yellow house.  I used to side eye that house anxiously, wondering about the comings and goings of the literally 16 people who lived inside of it, some of whom drove on the front lawn in order to access the garage. Today, my nosy ass didn't care.  Today, it was all about the gang of roaming birds that had recently descended unto our neighborhood, numbering no less than twenty. My hands tapped against my thighs.  I was agitated.  My eleven year old son had screamed a surprising fact at me a few days ago when the turkeys had abruptly lurched into our front yard whi...

A few years ago, well into my adulthood, my father said he had a gift for me.  He handed me a tiny pink box, and I immediately waged silent guesses as to what could be in it.  A golden pendant passed down six generations from the old country?  A key to a lockbox in the Swiss Alps or even the local Chase branch?  Maybe a check with a lot of commas, made out to me and folded up tightly as to fit in the tiny box.  I could use a check, as I'd recently lost track of a 401K and was beginning to believe I'd never find it.  Oops. I cracked open the box, and then rattled its contents around in bewilderment.  Were those...? "Your baby teeth," he proclaimed.  "Every last one of them." So much for the check, the lockbox key, or the old country pendant.  My sister and I exchanged glances, like we always did whenever our dad handed over something random that he'd come across in the deep, dark recesses of our childhood home.  Old progress reports from ...