Turkey Bones and “The Starving Armenians”

Of course, it is not the Armenians that are starving now, but the sad fact is that someone is always starving, a person, just like you and me.   When I was a kid, the "Starving Armenians were always invoked to get me to eat my cod-cakes and cucumbers.  Then, I wanted to send them the food I didn't want.   Now, I can't help but remember them as I work on capturing the last bits of meat from the turkey carcass.  I want to quit.  It's hard work, separating the few scraps of meat from the bones, gristle, skin and other unnamable scraps in the soup pot.   Ugh.  I want to just throw it all away.  I never understood how eating all this stuff would save any Armenians, but still, throwing away good food seems like a sin.   There are people who would practically kill for this carcass.  So I sit here working, pulling the bits of meet off the skin, bones and gristle.   I know better than to make myselffat because someone else is dying of starvation.  I know that intellectually.   And I've lived on the streets and been homeless and had to beg for food.  I know what hunger is like, real hunger.  I know it viscerally and some great deep fear wells up inside, a hollow hungry place that says, keep working.

 

We've already had two turkey soups from this carcass, now three, as I eat one for lunch, with spinach and oat bran.   But there will be a fourth.  I'd send it to someone somewhere, maybe Darryl, the homeless man we met near Eastern Market in Detroit.  I'd give it to him, if he were still there and I could find him and if I thought he'd eat it.  But I remember when we brought some good food to a homeless person near the Y.   We paid a lot for it, got it at an expensive restaurant.  But he threw it aside in disgust.  It was not what he wanted.

 

So we will eat the fourth soup tonight, the fourth and last, thank goodness.  We're getting tired of turkey leftovers.   Keith isn't that fond of turkey to begin with.  Tonight, it will be cream of turkey soup with white wine, spinach, carrot medallions, and black pepper.   I hope it's good.  I wish I could share it with someone who would be happy to have it.  Instead, we will try to enjoy it for them, and for the turkey who gave it's life, and for the beloved family we first ate the turkey with, and for the friends we love and for the earth that sustains us.   It will nourish us, eaten like that.

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I am certain of nothing but the Heart's affections and the truth of the Imagination- John Keats
Mary