THE SONIC BOOMER
Is it just me, or is Thanksgiving kind of early this year? I mean, isn’t it next Thursday? Thank goodness I’m not the one who cooks in our household — that would be Mark. So I won’t be the one running around looking for a last-minute turkey that will actually fit in the oven and wondering if jellied cranberries are still acceptable in this Age of Freshness and baking for days in advance in an effort to discern which pie is each guest’s “favorite” pie.
In fact, this year, we’re going to Virginia Beach for the holiday, so even Mark is not cooking. Brad and Brooke will be cooking while we play in the yard with our grandsons. Heaven!
Now it must be said (at every opportunity) that Brad is an F-18 Super Hornet fighter pilot who is currently the U.S. Navy’s top “adversary training” pilot. That means that Brad studies the air tactics used by our enemies, then duplicates them in the air while our own guys try to shoot him down. Delightful! In order to get to sleep at night, I steadfastly assume that paintballs are used for these training exercises, but I could be wrong.
And, because my mind easily runs rampant, I am already wondering what kind of a meal we will be served. I mean, if Brooke is cooking, she will probably go to the grocery store, select a turkey and bake it in the oven while she prepares all the other “fixin’s.”
But Brad. What if Brad, like his father before him, is doing all the cooking? I have no idea how a fighter pilot cooks. Logical Deb knows he probably goes to the grocery store and uses an oven just like everyone else, but not-so-logical Deb doesn’t want to listen to logical Deb’s boring scenario.
Not-so-logical Deb wants to think that her Thanksgiving bird will have been hunted down from the air using real-time video produced by infrared cameras, shot with a laser aimed by a low-flying pilot who is doing barrel rolls at the time, then retrieved by a hunting dog (dressed as a Pilgrim) as the jet screams out of there at 1,200 mph to an altitude of roughly 50,000 vertical feet.
After regrouping somewhere over Washington, D.C. (“cooling his jets,” so to speak), Brad will meander on home at a cruising speed of 777 mph and set the plane gently down on its aircraft carrier just off Virginia Beach before driving home in his SUV to casually toss the bird into a deep fryer.
What makes not-so-logical Deb’s plan so extraordinary is that, while the turkey on your table came in at a cost of approximately $23 (as per the American Farm Bureau Federation), the cost of my heretofore wild turkey was zero, zip, nada.
Unless you add in the cost of the Super Hornet, of course. Then my bird cost $61 million, not counting jet fuel or pilot time (which Brad would certainly donate).
Yup. I would very much like to know what a $61 million turkey tastes like, and this year’s the year!
