drumstick QUOTES

1 " The red-jacketed band stirred to life. The first musician raised his trumpet. The trombone dipped. The drumstick rose. Lea lowered her clarinet. It had been Brent's idea not to have their insturments rise and fall in unison. The staggered motion gave it a more exciting rhythm. "

― Paul Fleischman , Whirligig

2 " My mom says, " Do you know what the AIDS memorial quilt is all about?" Jump to how much I hate my brother at this moment.I bought this fabric because I thought it would make a nice panel for Shane," Mom says. " We just ran into some problems with what to sew on it." Give me amnesia.Flash.Give me new parents.Flash.Your mother didn't want to step on any toes," Dad says. He twists a drumstick off and starts scraping the meat onto a plate. " With gay stuff you have to be so careful since everything means something in secret code. I mean, we didn't want to give people the wrong idea." My Mom leans over to scoop yams onto my plate, and says, " Your father wanted a black border, but black on a field of blue would mean Shane was excited by leather sex, you know, bondage and discipline, sado and masochism." She says, " Really, those panels are to help the people left behind." Strangers are going to see us and see Shane's name," my dad says. " We didn't want them thinking things." The dishes all start their slow clockwise march around the table. The stuffing. The olives. The cranberry sauce. " I wanted pink triangles but all the panels have pink triangles," my mom says. " It's the Nazi symbol for homosexuals." She says," Your father suggested black triangles, but that would mean Shane was a lesbian. It looks like female pubic hair. The black triangle does." My father says, " Then I wanted a green border, but it turns out that would mean Shane was a male prostitute." My mom says, " We almost chose a red border, but that would mean fisting. Brown would mean either scat or rimming, we couldn't figure which." Yellow," my father says, " means watersports." A lighter shade of blue," Mom says, " would mean just regular oral sex." Regular white," my father says, " would mean anal. White could also mean Shane was excited by men wearing underwear." He says, " I can't remember which." My mother passes me the quilted chicken with the rolls still warm inside.We're supposed to sit and eat with Shane dead all over the table in front of us.Finally we just gave up," my mom says, " and I made a nice tablecloth out of the material." Between the yams and the stuffing, Dad looks down at his plate and says, " Do you know about rimming?" I know it isn't table talk.And fisting?" my mom asks.I say, I know. I don't mention Manus and his vocational porno magazines.We sit there, all of us around a blue shroud with the turkey more like a big dead baked animal than ever, the stuffing chock full of organs you can still recognize, the heart and gizzard and liver, the gravy thick with cooked fat and blood. The flower centerpiece could be a casket spray.Would you pass the butter, please?" my mother says. To my father she says, " Do you know what felching is? "

3 " Ultimately, the roast turkey must be regarded as a monument to Boomer's love.

Look at it now, plump and glossy, floating across Idaho as if it were a mammoth, mutated seed pod. Hear how it backfires as it passes the silver mines, perhaps in tribute to the origin of the knives and forks of splendid sterling that a roast turkey and a roast turkey alone possesses the charisma to draw forth into festivity from dark cupboards.

See how it glides through the potato fields, familiarly at home among potatoes but with an air of expectation, as if waiting for the flood of gravy.

The roast turkey carries with it, in its chubby hold, a sizable portion of our primitive and pagan luggage.

Primitive and pagan? Us? We of the laser, we of the microchip, we of the Union Theological Seminary and Time magazine? Of course. At least twice a year, do not millions upon millions of us cybernetic Christians and fax machine Jews participate in a ritual, a highly stylized ceremony that takes place around a large dead bird?

And is not this animal sacrificed, as in days of yore, to catch the attention of a divine spirit, to show gratitude for blessings bestowed, and to petition for blessings coveted?

The turkey, slain, slowly cooked over our gas or electric fires, is the central figure at our holy feast. It is the totem animal that brings our tribe together.

And because it is an awkward, intractable creature, the serving of it establishes and reinforces the tribal hierarchy. There are but two legs, two wings, a certain amount of white meat, a given quantity of dark. Who gets which piece; who, in fact, slices the bird and distributes its limbs and organs, underscores quite emphatically the rank of each member in the gathering.

Consider that the legs of this bird are called 'drumsticks,' after the ritual objects employed to extract the music from the most aboriginal and sacred of instruments. Our ancestors, kept their drums in public, but the sticks, being more actively magical, usually were stored in places known only to the shaman, the medicine man, the high priest, of the Wise Old Woman. The wing of the fowl gives symbolic flight to the soul, but with the drumstick is evoked the best of the pulse of the heart of the universe.

Few of us nowadays participate in the actual hunting and killing of the turkey, but almost all of us watch, frequently with deep emotion, the reenactment of those events. We watch it on TV sets immediately before the communal meal. For what are footballs if not metaphorical turkeys, flying up and down a meadow? And what is a touchdown if not a kill, achieved by one or the other of two opposing tribes? To our applause, great young hungers from Alabama or Notre Dame slay the bird. Then, the Wise Old Woman, in the guise of Grandma, calls us to the table, where we, pretending to be no longer primitive, systematically rip the bird asunder.

Was Boomer Petaway aware of the totemic implications when, to impress his beloved, he fabricated an outsize Thanksgiving centerpiece? No, not consciously. If and when the last veil dropped, he might comprehend what he had wrought. For the present, however, he was as ignorant as Can o' Beans, Spoon, and Dirty Sock were, before Painted Stick and Conch Shell drew their attention to similar affairs.

Nevertheless, it was Boomer who piloted the gobble-stilled butterball across Idaho, who negotiated it through the natural carving knives of the Sawtooth Mountains, who once or twice parked it in wilderness rest stops, causing adjacent flora to assume the appearance of parsley. "

― Tom Robbins , Skinny Legs and All