Talking Turkey

 

My mind has developed a tendency to pop out of gear. High mileage, lack of maintenance, and indiscriminate use of aftermarket additives have undoubtedly contributed to the clunky condition of my mental transmission.

There needn't be a heavy load on the system, like trying to determine whether the breast end or the tush end of the battery goes against the little spring for this sudden shift to neutral, this clanking and grinding and over-revolution of engine, to occur. Nope, it can, and will, happen just about anywhere at anytime.

Take a few days ago. A shopping cart and I were wobbling down an over-waxed aisle through the meat morgue in a grocery store in Milton-Freewater, Oregon, when a red Magic Marker sign introduced me to the concept of “Turkey Ham” and my clutch began to slip.

My legs stopped shuffling, my vision blurred, and there in the middle of the Temple of Bratwurst, I watched, projected on my own special monitor, the scene of Betsy Ross, in her understandably early-American living room, sewing the thirteenth star on the original Old Glory. You know the painting. It wasn't until Betsy snipped the final threads with her pearly incisors that the image faded and I was able to wheel around the corner to the day-old bread department.

The over-riding emotion of food shoppers in today's nexus of five-dollar butter and plummeting income is befuddled indecision, so grocery stores are safe places for those inclined to space out. None of my fellow shoppers noticed my little fit. But I was worried about the incident. Had my primary memory cable short-circuited to my clogged patriotism glands? Why had pulverized (“comminuted” is the word the industry uses) poultry parts triggered a visit to revisionist history? (Betsy Ross did not design or build the American flag. Francis Hopkins, a guy, did and was officially paid for the task by Congress in 1781.)

         During the half-hour cruise back to our hovel, I was able to jump-start my re-collector and ride its stained upholstery far enough into the past to solve this little mystery of scrambled synapses. The turkey/flag conjunction was encoded in the automated teller portion of my memory bank because of Dr. Walker Lane, Professor of Humanities, Tufts University, and a course of his I attended entitled “Practical Applications of Anthropology.”

     Dr.Lane assigned the following to the students in his seminar: Analyze a simple everyday event in North American life. Since I'd just spent a turkey filled Thanksgiving as the guest of a physics researcher who had worked at Princeton with Einstein, I came up with the following hypothesis: In order to supply American holiday traditions, there are a gazillion turkeys in supermarkets between Thanksgiving and Christmas, and an estimated 25 percent of them are marketed as fresh. Since all the birds weigh within a few pounds of each other, and turkeys gain a couple of pounds a month, and the incubation period of a turkey is 26 days, my calculations showed that there certainly must be one brief period in February or March when there is a tremendous amount of sexual activity in the species Meleagris galloparvo domesticus, the common domestic turkey. I thought of that time span as National Turkey Boinking Week.

     The closest commercial turkey operation to Boston was just north of Providence, Rhode Island, so I borrowed a 1961Valliant and drove 50 miles to Tucker's Turkey Ranch, where I knocked on the door of a caramel colored Victorian, with pen and paper in hand. Mr. Tucker opened the door, I introduced myself as a student of Dr.Lane and phrased my research project as daintily as possible. He reached behind the door, pulled out an LL Bean chore coat, smiled, and said “Come with me, Son.” 

There were thousands of big white birds living in low sheds on that ranch. As we stood there staring across a galaxy of feathers, Tucker explained to me that turkey eggs, once fertilized, can be kept under stable refrigerated conditions for months, so the mathematical problem involved with marketing the product during the holiday season was not so much how to time turkey sex as how to gather the eggs, keep them cool, and time the placement of them in the incubators.

The incubator barn at Tucker's was an acre building crammed full of incandescent lights and plastic tubs. Turkeys, he said, have sex all the time. Did I want to witness “the act”?

I still wish that I hadn't said yes. Turkeys, Mr. Tucker taught, possess in that gnarly wrinkly skin that covers their necks and heads, certain neural networks in the flesh structures called “caruncles” which when the bird is excited or aroused cause a neon-like display of red, white, and blue colors to flush up and down their necks and heads.

     The free-range brothel portion of the turkey yard at Tucker's was a little Las Vegas of rainbow poultry skin. No sooner did one furious incident of feathered lust and painted embarrassment conclude, than another coupling occurred. Clearly there was no such thing as National Turkey Boinking Week. It went on perpetually. I closed my notebook, thanked Mr. Tucker, and headed toward home to write a paper about blushing.

By the same pattern of cosmic coincidence that allows us to discover a lost eyebrow ring when looking for a matching sock, another student in Dr. Lane's class chose American national symbols as her class project and reported that Benjamin Franklin was the statesman responsible for convincing his associates that the American flag should be red, white, and blue and that he also introduced at the First Continental Congress a bill proposing that the turkey be named the national bird. I figure that the reason we ended up with the bald eagle is that Mr. Franklin’s compatriots guessed what Ben was doing with his spare time.