Poets’ Corner: Feela on “The Wrong Restaurant” for Vaxgiving!

22 Nov Poets’ Corner: Feela on “The Wrong Restaurant” for Vaxgiving!

Lincoln called on Americans to observe the last Thursday of November “as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise” after the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863.

“I celebrated Thanksgiving the old-fashioned way. I invited everyone in my neighborhood to my house, we had an enormous feast, and then I killed them and took their land,” Jon Stewart.

And while we are on the subject of facts and funtasy of the holiday, we invite you to enjoy the following Thanksgiving narrative by our not-regular-enough contributor David Feela. His mythical riff should shore you up for your annual tradition, a banquet good enough for the gods – and your drunken uncle’s insistence America will be great again and/or your parents breaking out the photos from your awkward years.

The Wrong Restaurant

The place was empty. The waitress showed me to a table near the window. She seated me, then apologized for the frenzied pace of the evening, rushing off to the kitchen where she claimed something was on the cusp of burning.
I picked up the menu and searched for a Thanksgiving special. Returning, she looked disheveled, as if she’d just finished wrestling with the chef.
“Is everything okay back there in the kitchen?”
“Oh, yes,” she sighed, running one hand through her hair while the other smoothed a few wrinkles out of her skirt.
“May I bring you something to drink?”
“What do you recommend?”
“Nectar of the gods.”
I picked up the wine list, scanned it, but nothing going by that name appeared.
“Is this nectar concoction a mixed drink?”
“Oh no, it’s the actual thing.”
I looked up at her, expecting a smile, a giggle, some acknowledgment of the incredulity of what she had just said, but her eyes drifted dreamily toward the ceiling.
“So, what’s in this nectar drink?”
“Gee, I’m not entirely sure, but I know Zeus orders it every time he’s here.”
“Zeus?”
“Yeah, him and Cronus. And the Vestal Virgins, when they’re out on the town, which isn’t that often I’m sorry to say.”
I glanced around the restaurant once more, every table vacant, not a soul aside from the waitress and me.
“Are you trying to tell me the Greek gods eat here?”
“Oh yeah, and the Roman gods, too, but not on the same night.”
I decided to probe a little deeper: “Has Thor been in?”
She glanced around surreptitiously, then leaned close to my ear: “He ordered take-out once, but complained about the yams.”
I didn’t know what else to say; my knowledge of mythology was hampered by a single, poorly taught high school English elective over forty years ago.
“Do you serve ambrosia?”
“That’s our speciality!” she announced, clapping her hands together like a water nymph that’s just had a shower.
“I’ll have a mug of your nectar, then, a plate of ambrosia and a drumstick on the side.” Mythological food is fine, if one has an appetite for it, but a little fat can get a person through the leaner times.