Get Your Gander Up

   Although in our twenties, my sister and I still found ourselves relegated to the kids' table for Christmas dinner. Not because we were acting childish, but because the “grown-up” table simply wasn't big enough.

   She and I (and her then boyfriend) were not at all put out by this arrangement. Being at an age when you're certain your level of wit and sophistication has far outpaced the old people in the room, we thought it perfectly acceptable, if not in fact, preferable. Frolicking with freedom to discuss topics suitable to our age group in as off-colored a manner as we dared.

   At the time of this specific Christmas, my mother was married to a man named Dick, and they lived in a cozy (aka small and tight), wood-paneled trailer. During holidays, Mom went all out with the decorating. Every room swollen in festivity. A knick for every nook, a knack for every cranny. One of Mom's favorite decorating schemes was to display the Christmas cards she'd received that year across the backside of the overhead cabinets which divided the kitchen from the dining room. A cardboard array of wishes and goodwill.

   In addition to my mother and her husband, my aunt and uncle and my grandmother were seated at the grown-up table, gobbling up roast beef, caramel-coated dinner rolls, wild rice, and steamed veggies.

   My grandmother, nearing her eighties, was profoundly hard-of-hearing which caused her to speak at an elevated volume, and by that I mean loud. She was a God-fearing woman whose worst curse word was “Ah sugar!” When retelling a story in which a character used a curse word, she would lower her head conspiratorially and whisper the offending quote.

   In between bites of savory flesh, she scanned the Christmas cards overhead, catching sight of one featuring a Christmas goose. The others installed at the table were quiet, no one was speaking. The only sounds were the forks clinking on plates or knives scraping through carcass. Until.

   Her unembarrassed words blared across the table. “Have you ever ate goose Dick?”

   There was no comma in her statement. There was no pause.

   Lips curled in, trying to hold it together, I looked across the table at my smirking, wide-eyed sister, all self-restraint abandoning me. “No just the balls,” I honked.

   Red faced, tears of laughter cascading down our cheeks, we delighted at this Christmas gift, better than any we opened all that day.