The Thanksgiving Chicken
	It was the day after Thanksgiving, merely two months after 9/11. The atmosphere everywhere was bittersweet. The sweet part, being that people were so kind to each other. It was abundantly present in traffic, at the entrances to small convenience stores where there were no automatic doors. Everywhere. I was exhibiting and selling my paintings at a gallery in Cape Cod. I remember standing at the counter of the Zephyrhills Post Office while shipping one of my paintings to the Cape. The postal employee said that the travel time would take much longer than it had in the past. She said that security at the airports was causing the delay since the New York attack. I understood. I'll never forget, the two of us standing there talking business and both of us with eyes welled up with tears. When Thanksgiving came, I was invited to have dinner with friends. We had a wonderful time. That evening they gave me a large plate of food to take home with me. As you know, it's always so good the next day. But there was no turkey left. That was all right. I'd make do. The next morning my good friend, Bilge Udd, who's also my handy man, came to my house to help with some work. Bilge spends about half of his life on boats. The area where the boat's hull curves upward and becomes the vertical sides is called the bilge, both inside and outside the boat. So his nautical name was dubbed appropriately. His knowledge and expertise is well known for snook fishing and bringing in the big ones. When lunch time arrived, Bilge and I, as usual, went to the Golden Corral Restaurant in Zephyrhills. As we were making our way down the line I saw a monstrous pan of fried chicken. I knew instantly, there was my "turkey" to complete my meal of Thanksgiving leftovers later that night. I put two large pieces on my plate. I ate one at the restaurant and, as quiet as a cat, I rolled the other breast up in a paper napkin and slipped it into my right front pocket. Bilge and I sat and talked for about an hour and a half, mainly about the Twin Towers and what had happened. I told him that about six times a year I would go into, and fly out of, Logan Airport in Boston, when I visited Cape Cod. The planes that left Logan on 9/11 to take down the Twin Towers left about three days after I did. We left the restaurant and came back to my house. I went to the bathroom to change into my work clothes. When I did, I saw on the outside of my right thigh a...well, I didn't know what it was. It looked like a big, water-filled blister the size of a baseball, hanging there like a breast, and I don't mean a chicken breast. What the?... I called Bilge to come in and look at it because I was completely freaked. We both knew that I have no sense of feeling in that leg; no sense of pain and especially no temperature sensation. We started pondering over what we had done that day, step by step. When we got to the part about eating at the restaurant, we looked at each other and said simultaneously, "THE CHICKEN !!!" Yes, it was the hot chicken. The whole time we were sitting there talking dolefully about 9/11 the chicken was burning a playing card-sized hole into the side of my leg and I didn't feel a thing. It must've been as hot as Hell's hinges. After the blister broke, a deep wound was left that was shaped like an American eagle with its wings half-open and its head turned to one side. I wonder if our patriotic conversation had anything to do with it looking like that. Now, fifteen years later, it's a big, eagle-shaped scar that I would prefer to any tattoo. Lash Out Loud