THANKSGIVING GREETINGS FROM 1999!

What a difference half a decade makes. It doesn’t seem so long ago that "American Beauty" was the talk of the town, and the St. Louis Rams were on their way to winning their first Super Bowl. Then you sit down to Thanksgiving dinner in 1999, and you realize just how different things were, only a few years back.

I hung out with Rupert Zwevoid during the Thanksgiving holiday. Originally, I was going to hop into the "Mr. Peabody," and blow up the universe so I could be with family in 2004. Unfortunately, I had already blown up the universe three times the night before, when I was in a rush to get back to 1999 to see John Irving’s stage play of "The Cider House Rules." I only intended to blow up the universe once, to get from 2004 to 1999. But after I arrived in 1999, I remembered that I left the front door unlocked back in 2004. So I hit the "Armaegeddon" button again and ended up making a round trip. Yeah, holiday travel definitely sucks. Having blown up the universe three times in the span of only ten minutes, I thought it prudent not to do it again until Saturday at the earliest.

Before you pity me for having spent Thanksgiving away from family and loved ones (Those two don’t necessarily belong in the same category), please remember that I am nothing if not an intellectually-curious cat. Actually, I was very down about having to remain lost in time. But then Rupert Zwevoid told me, "Phil, it’s dangerous to blow up the universe more than three times in a 48-hour period. But look on the bright side: You’re the first earthling time traveler to spend the Thanksgiving holiday temporally displaced. Your suffering is of tremendous scientific value to all mankind."

"Scientific value, eh?" I answered, considering what Rupert had just said. At length, I agreed with him. I should have been quite pleased! There I was, a student from five years ahead in the timestream, living a holiday from five years back. How unprecedented! I spent my first 1999 Thanksgiving in Miami, not New York City, so this second visit certainly counted as a journey into the great unknown. Therefore, was I not unlike some kind of chronologically-cruising Magellan? A real maverick for my day and age…?

Taking Rupert’s cue of treating Thanksgiving 1999 as a day of momentous scientific value, I decided to play archaeologist, and appropriately, brought a weather-beaten journal and a magnifying glass with me as Rupert Zwevoid and I sought out the local fare at a diner down the street. "I am Ponce De Leon about to trip over Florida," I said to myself. "Every moment of this day must be treated with the utmost detachment and detail, because of its inherent scientific value." The following excerpts are from my extensive journal entries of that night:

PHIL X’S JOURNAL, NOVEMBER 25, 1999. JOURNEYS INTO THE "MILL BASIN DINER."

--"The entranceway is guarded by a sentry, who asks for the number of Rupert Zwevoid and my ‘party.’ Rupert tells him there are two members in our ‘party.’ The sentry immediately summons a woman named ‘Cloris.’ She says that she will be our ‘waitress/weightress(?)’for the evening. Has she been given this title because her duties involve ‘waiting’ on us? Or perhaps it is because she will be bringing us our food, which will ‘weigh’ us down after we ingest it."

--"Cloris has put a cylinder full of a clear liquid in front of me. There are cube-shaped vessels of a similarly-clear composition floating on the surface of the liquid. The cylinder is cold and moist to the touch. Rupert Zwevoid has a cylinder full of the same clear liquid and cube-shaped vessels. He sips from it fearlessly, then stares at me writing in my journal before shaking his head."

--"We are each given a plate containing half-inch thick slices of a supple, gray-brownish animal flesh, and half-inch thick slices of a less-pliable white flesh. The animal that produced these two substances had a composition similar to chicken, and a scent like chicken, too, albeit more earthy. Both the gray-brownish and the white animal flesh samples are covered with a viscous fluid that is an even darker brown, and smells like fat. Cloris refers to the flesh on the plates as ‘turkey.’

"'Made from Turks?!’ I inquire of her, quite astounded. Cloris doesn’t answer. She merely stares at me, then smiles as if imagining my head to be sitting underneath a large mallet. I separate small bits of ‘turkey’ using the crude utensils the diner has provided. Each bit is placed on one of the thin glass slides I happened to bring with me, and sealed using a drop of clear liquid from the cylinders, which I had suspected would be good for this purpose. Rupert Zwevoid, throughout all this, has been diligently devouring the small pile of diminutive green spheroids in a corner of his plate. He notices me watching him engage in this mode of scientific inquiry, and makes it a point to fling a spoonful of the green spheroids at me, no doubt testing their susceptibility to impact, as well as their aerodynamic shape.

"'Don’t take notes about me while I’m eating,’ my colleague says."

--"About an hour into the excavation, and I have nearly completed dissecting the bread-based compound which, according to the chef I interviewed, had been ‘stuffed’ inside the ‘turkey.’ (‘Good lord! It’s like some kind of mummification process!’ I exclaimed.) The bread-based compound was a particular challenge, given the many spices and starchy elements that had to be separated and placed onto their own individual slides. Less challenging was the reddish-purple jelly. Although it lost integrity whenever placed inside a slide, I doubted that its chemical composition could be altered by mere smooshing.

"What I find quite interesting about the reddish-purple jelly is how it wobbles! I kept tapping at it and tapping at it with the side of my spoon, and its oscillating movement hypnotized me. Lifting a slice of it up on the tip of my fork (a crude diner utensil), I asked Rupert Zwevoid, ‘Do you think I could make it vibrate at different frequencies, depending on which sounds I phonate?’ I immediately began a tour of each of the Cardinal Vowels, making it only halfway through before a small child at an adjacent table started to cry, and Rupert begged me to stop."

--"I think we are nearing the end. Cloris is bringing two small plates of a brown, cinammon-smelling, gelatinous substance inside a flaky crust, to the table. She has not even set them down, but I have whipped out my magnifying glass and have begun examining the gelatin’s surface. I can hear Cloris talking to Rupert, ‘He just arrive here from another planet or somethin?’

‘No. Strangely enough… ah, never mind.’ Rupert says."

END EXCERPTS FROM JOURNAL


After exiting the diner, Rupert told me that I should go home, hop into the "Mr. Peabody," jet forward a day short of five years, and spend Thanksgiving with my family in 2004. I asked him about the risk of blowing up the universe too much within such a short period of time. Wasn’t there an outside chance something terrible could happen to either the universe, or myself?

"If only," Rupert said, shuddering to look at me. Then he walked up the street alone.

Ah, it’s good friends that make the holidays special. I sure hope the universe can take one more total annihilation.