That Bird had Flown

I heard tonight about one of those workplace kerfuffles where Defendant ate Plaintiff's sandwich. Defendant claims mitigating factors: she was sick, and believed that the relatively similar sandwich belonging to Plaintiff was, in fact, her own. She further claims that she mostly saw it as food, which was necessary to keep alive. She was suffering, in other words. I think we should keep this in mind.

I had a similar situation in the workplace a few years back involving an entire turkey. I'm kind of a sucker for those yearly Thanksgiving events where the supermarket gives you a free frozen turkey if you spend a certain amount in the course of a month or so. In the last few years the amount has been pretty high—say three hundred bucks—for which you get a 15-dollar turkey. But this promotion has some sort of evil grasp on my mind. I become like a gambling addict, like a prospector driven mad by the thought of a rich strike. At a certain point, watching the amount of money I have in eligible purchases inching up, I get obsessed with the thought of that free turkey. I buy things I might not actually need any time soon, things I'll want sometime, expensive things, like four boxes of wild rice, say. I don't know why this is. I don't even like turkey that much.

But eventually the happy day comes, the receipt says I can have my turkey, and it sits for months in the freezer and finally I make a nice meal out of it. Wild rice goes well with turkey, by the way. This one year, I got the receipt with my turkey certificate on it while buying food for lunch at the supermarket near work. I immediately redeemed it, took my frozen turkey to work, and put it in the refrigerator to take home.

Later in the day, I went to get my turkey and put it in the car. I stared in disbelief at the empty air in the refrigerator where my turkey had been. Outrage! I marched myself upstairs and announced to some friends that the doors should be locked and nobody allowed to leave until my stolen turkey was recovered. One friend started to chuckle, because she thought she knew what happened. She had organized a food drive for the local working poor, and one part of it was to bring in frozen turkeys that would be delivered to the deserving needy folks. That very day, as it happened, was the one designated for people to bring in their frozen turkeys. The procedure was for them to put the turkeys in the refrigerator, and a guy would put them in a van and take them to the agency that would distribute them. This had been done. The guy had probably passed me in the hall about 90 seconds after I put my turkey in the fridge.

I sagged a little, chuckling. A kindly providence had allowed me to act generously, if only after the fact. I've been in publishing all my life, and figure that I'm pretty much part of the working poor myself. But if someone can't quite afford a fifteen-dollar turkey, well, hell, they're welcome to mine. Sometimes you're generous voluntarily, and sometimes it's involuntary, but either way, a kindly providence is at work and life being hard enough, you should just be glad that it worked at all and that you were part of it. It's like Scrooge on Christmas Day—he had a chance to do good, in spite of himself, and he was glad about it. That's how I felt about that turkey. My own Thanksgiving turkey from last year is still in the freezer, and I really need to defrost the damn thing and eat it sometime soon.