Warm Thanksgiving Wishes

I know, I know…Thanksgiving was almost a week ago, but a good story sometimes takes some time to tell.

The picture above is of one of the Thanksgiving turkeys – Thanksgiving was not at our house, but at the house of a relative who with her husband are very good cooks, so that is nice. They prepared a very good meal – and had smoked one of the turkeys in advance. One of their adult children thought it a good idea to put the previously-smoked turkey on the grill to warm it up.

Good idea except that turkeys drip a lot grease (even after they are smoked) and grills by their nature have a bunch of open flames inside them. There was a very large fire, luckily contained by the closed grill, and the result was one very black turkey.

There’s a related video of the event, with another guest trying to pull the burning turkey off the grill, and on that video you can clearly hear me saying “he’s going to set his shirt on fire” because his sleeve was plunging into the flames as he tried to fork the turkey onto a platter. He didn’t set his shirt on fire, and all was fine – there were two other turkeys, plenty for the large crowd.

But.

Turned out what I said on the video was foreshadowing 😂

A few hours later, post-dinner, all the guests were chatting pleasantly with full stomachs and I was wandering around, talking to different folks. I wanted to join a conversation with a couple people who were seated next to the table, but there were no chairs – but there was a very solid coffee table that was just right for sitting (I thought). That coffee table also had a couple lit candles on it, which I scooted over so I could sit down.

Cue conversation, but after about half a minute I start to feel heat on my back and figure I was still too close to the candles – so I stood up. At that point, a bunch of things happened – a couple people yelled that I was on fire (I didn’t really hear that!), I felt more heat on my back so put my hand around to feel what was going on, I immediately felt a burn on my finger and at the same time started instinctively (I guess) moving away from the other people and the couch that I was next to.

My brain started to register that the problem was worse than I thought. I’d like to think that “stop, drop, and roll” went through my head as I’d like to think my Boy Scout training served me well – but honestly, I think I was thinking that it was probably just a little scorch and if I could just get away from the other people I could just pat it out. Not good thinking in retrospect.

In the middle of that going through my head, as I was moving across the room – one of the guests approached me quickly from behind (coincidentally, the same guest who had forked the turkey earlier and I had said he was going to set his shirt on fire!). He told me to get down on the ground, and I think my befuddled brain somehow objected and I think I said I was okay (I am not, in retrospect, happy with how well I handled this personal crisis).

Luckily, he disagreed with my disagreement, grabbed me, and threw me (very forcefully) on the floor and flipped me on my back.

That, of course, was the correct course of action.

Several people pulled me back up, and then started to tear my still smoldering shirt off my back. Turns out, I had been in flames basically from my belt to just under my hair – the entire back of the shirt burned out, and I have some burned hair on the back of my head to show for it. Luckily, I was wearing an undershirt also, and that did not ignite – it singed and blackened, but it protected my skin somewhat.

The aftermath – some scorch marks on the host’s rug, loss of one button-down shirt, a set of very minor burns between my shoulder blades which for a few days felt like a sunburn but today are starting to itch quit a lot. Overall, I was extremely lucky that the other guests ignored me and took events into their own hands – it could have been much worse. I told the guy who threw me on the floor that I now owe him a life-debt that I will have to figure out how to repay.

On the plus side, the twenty-some people who were there all went home with a good story to tell. “Yeah your Thanksgiving sounds interesting, but nobody set themselves on fire!” and so on. I think maybe one of the life lessons from this is – flameless candles, check them out.

I am extremely thankful that nobody else was hurt, or any houses burned down, due to my stupidity. So I guess this turned into a Thanksgiving entry after all!