Triple Thanksgiving

Back in late September, the Americorps girls had an early Thanksgiving dinner that was fabulous. Turkey, pierogies (which I was introduced to by my Polish foster grandparents), stuffing, the works. I didn't think Thanksgiving could be any more satiating. But yesterday, we had a Thanksgiving lunch of turkey, asparagus, cranberry sauce, and crab dip at my house-sit followed by a pre-Thanksgiving at the anthropology professor's house on Douglas where he served Mimosas and homemade Sockeye salmon smoked the Tlingit way and then a Thanksgiving extravaganza at his friend's house complete with an 18-lb. bird, pumpkin soup (yum), carb overload, and topped off with homemade chocolate ice cream, pumpkin pies, and pear tart. And it doesn't end there; there's 40 pounds of turkey at the Vista House waiting to be cooked this Sunday.

I asked Seamus to accompany me to the professor's get-together and as soon as we walked in his house, we saw his picture on their coffee table. He's acting in this burlesquepade this weekend called Queen Isthmus Christmas. It's a parody of King Island Christmas, a well-known Alaska holiday play, and the paper did a 2-page layout on it. The photograph covered the entire front and showed Seamus in his Boy Scout costume looking up in his usual sensual expression of abject fear mixed with curiosity at a giant pair of fishnet-covered legs on stage.

So the professor's friend is the president of Glacier Grotto, a caving club, which I've been interested in joining. He said they'd start meeting in January and gave me his contact info, and him and the professor recounted stories that ranged from harrowing bear attacks to funny film crew anecdotes. They invited me to join them on their expeditions for a week next summer and promised to get me caught up on the techniques and equipment over the winter. There's also an upcoming deadline for abstracts for the Alaska Anthropology Conference which my professor wants me to attend next March. If I wrote a paper, it would be about the subsistence patterns of the Filipino community in Juneau and Ketchikan, researched from a possible "internship" with the AK Dept. of Fish & Game. So while my boyfriend is out gallavanting around Italy in short shorts or God knows what, I'll be freezing my butt off on a skiff doing participant observation among fishermen. And still, I am thankful for these things.