“So, what time do you think we should have Thanksgiving dinner?” my husband asked yesterday. We were in the kitchen, and my back happened at that moment to be turned to him while I was chopping something. I paused and looked out the window. It seemed to me that his voice, when he asked the question, had had a curiously floaty, artless quality about it.
Suspiciously, I leapt to silent conclusions. Cunningly, I pretended to be innocent of suspicion.
“Oh, I was thinking sometime in the late afternoon,” I said, in a manner that was just shy of curious floaty artlessness.
It was daring, too, for I suspect that he suspected that I knew that he knew that I knew what he was thinking.
Still, I was darned if I was going to be the one to say, “Hey, are you thinking what I think you’re thinking?” If I did that, then he would instantly be on the moral high ground, and I would be somewhere beneath it.
Where is the moral high ground, when it comes to the timing of Thanksgiving dinner?
It is on fake grass in some remote place, where men in tight uniforms rush about mauling each other in a sport that is of utter indifference to your faithful columnist and was — so she thought — of complete unconcern to the man she married, when she married him.
The man she married comes from a foreign country, where men do not play the mystifying game with concussed announcers and an ovoid ball. Yet he knew of this game, and he liked it.
“I’ve been a Dallas Cowboys fan since I was nine,” he had told her, when they were courting.
She had thought this endearing and correct: What little boy from a foreign country wouldn’t admire an American team named after dashing horsemen on the open plain? It only made him more suitable, that he should be fond of her nation’s favorite sport in a hypothetical, romantic sort of way.
What she hadn’t grasped at the time, and is only really beginning to comprehend, is that football can work as a type of time bomb. She has seen this in other households.
The fuse may be lit in childhood, but in some men (and maybe some women, though she has not witnessed it) for many years it burns so low and long that it seems not to be sizzling at all.
Then slowly, with gathering intensity, the husband begins to disappear into NFL programming for long stretches on weekend afternoons. The ungenerous and unwise wife may gripe about this. For one day, BAM! The time bomb goes off. Now the husband not only wants to watch football, but he wants to do it on Thanksgiving and wants to time the meal so that he can.
And the worst thing about that is, well, why shouldn’t he? Sure, his wife grew up in a non-football family in which the TV would never go on at Thanksgiving. But it’s just as traditional, just as patriotic, to enjoy the second half of Thanksgiving in front of the box watching beefy Cowboys frolic with the ovoid. After all, they’re on the moral high ground.
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
