Hmmmm...Thanksgiving. Again. Woohoo!

My family will have a huge feed, of course. We prepare too much food and graze all afternoon. I don't know about you, but I find this a highly satisfying way to spend a holiday.

Seeing how this week has been, for the most part, uneventful, I now bring you a flashback. Picture it, if you will...the Friday after Thanksgiving, 1987. Night.

It had been raining for days, it seemed like. Flooding was going on all around (and in) my hometown of West Memphis. I had my mom's car, with the specific admonition to "not leave town, and just go straight to your friend's house!"

Right, mum.

So me and the following people go "riding around" in my mom's car.

[A quick definition for you: "riding around" means piling into a car and cruising aimlessly. It was massively popular when I was in high school. I think it might be a local phenomena; both my sisters and my brother did it when they were young.]

The Riders That Night

• Stephen, one of my very best friends. In high school he was heroin-skinny and seemed to vibrate with excess energy. He carried a bottle of Polo cologne with him and applied it constantly. He works for a lamp company now.
• Jennifer, my first girlfriend ever. She came from a far lower socioeconomic demographic than myself. I dated her in high school and still shudder at the thought of it, sometimes. I wouldn't be surprised to see her on Jerry Springer someday.
• Pam, Jennifer's best friend. Pam considered Miss Piggy her role model - in a totally positive way. She had some massive personal problems and a love of illegal drugs. She dropped out of high school several months short of graduation.
• Dyanna, another friend of everyone's, really. A little sprig of a girl who dated a a guy in his twenties all through high school. I never understood that; what does a guy that old talk about with a teenager? What do they do? Anyway, Dyanna was driving.

So we're riding around, Dyanna driving, making our way deep into the farm and access roads that surround West Memphis. We're all happily singing along with the radio and talking about our respective Thanksgivings. We decide to head back to Pam's to fuck around with her Ouija board.

Dyanna turns in to what appears to be a driveway.

It was, in fact, a ditch.

"Aw, man," said Stephen, "we're fuckin' stuck."

"Goddamnit," Dyanna hissed, tromping the gas and the clutch and grinding the gears savagely.

Jennifer, Stephen, Pam and I pile out of the car, leaving Dyanna to work the pedals. We immediately sink ankle-deep in soft mud. As we're pushing at the front bumper Dyanna stomps the gas and sprays us all with fine droplets of filth. The car moves not an inch.

But all of our engine-revving and yelling at each other did do some good. The guy who lived in the tar-paper shack about a hundred yards up the road heard us and came out for a look.

"Y'all stuck?" he yelled from his porch.

"Think so!" I yelled back at him. He went back inside. I was terrified he was going to call the cops; none of us were over fifteen. You have to be sixteen to drive in Arkansas.

He didn't call the police, though. Moments later he came out of his shed, riding his shiny four-wheeler. We all squished up to the road and watched him attach a chain to the back bumper. Then he pulled it on out, the front end of the Pulsar making a deeply cool slurping sound as it came out of the mud.

"You are god, man," I gushed to him afterwards, "if I had any money I'd give it to you."

"Don't worry 'bout it," he gave me a snaggletoothed grin and rode off. It was pouring rain again, and the mud was washed off the car by the time we got back to Pam's. I made it home by my curfew.

My mom never suspected a thing.

Happy Thanksgiving!

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