The photograph shows my brother Kevin standing in awe of me, the master engineer and painter, painting our toybox red, one hand in my pocket, and not a drop of paint on my clothes.
Or my brother stood there thinking, "What BS, we didn't ask for a toybox, and if we did, it certainly wouldn't be fire-engine red! And who lets a 5-year-old paint in his street clothes? And, what about that hat?"
Anyway, a few weeks later, the day before Thanksgiving, the toybox became the temporary home of a half-frozen, 12-pound turkey corpse.
Turkey moocher Hairy. It was his first mug shot and last turkey, as far as I know. This was also one of my first photographs.
My mother started her day by placing the frozen turkey to thaw in the kitchen sink. In the early afternoon, she dragged my brother and me to the grocery store. We lived in Hastings Ranch at the time, so stores were not exactly close by. But I can’t imagine being gone for more than an hour.
When we returned, the turkey was missing. My mother was dumbfounded. Had someone stolen her turkey?
She couldn’t believe Hairy, our 8-pound cat, could drag a 12-pound frozen turkey out of the sink, across the house, into our bedroom, into our closet, then up into the toy box. But there is no other explanation (my brother neither confirmed nor denied his involvement). And the cat had nothing to say about it.
There’s not much more to the story than that. And while I can't remember the details, if I were to guess, my mom cooked the turkey, didn't wash our toys, and I started losing my hair at 18.
Hairy lived on till he was 13 or 14. I don’t know what happened to the toy box.