The great bird has been rendered into fleshy, boneless, delectable bits. The stovetop, clean at last, reflects the first steely glints of the early morning sun. The quartet of eager feline noses, only days before a ubiquitous kitchen nuisance, no longer jostled each other for choice positions around the garbage can, the scraps and scrapings of the feast long since carted off to quiescently descend into putrefaction in the collection bins.

Another Thanksgiving day has come and gone, though of course its delicious remnants promise to provide another week’s worth of savory echoes. From Thursday morning’s leaf-raking to the rainy, tailor-made-for-a-fireplace Sunday, the long holiday weekend was about as good as one might reasonably wish for. While weekends will always be a welcome respite from The Grind, two days isn’t always enough to fully relax; Saturdays are sometimes uncomfortably crammed with activity, things to do and see before Sunday, over which looms the pall of the next day’s return to wage slavery. But four days? Four days allows the luxury of a full weekend’s worth of indolence before the end of the break even starts to enter one’s mind. The break was nearly perfect.

In the hood, hoopty, hate low, niggas don’t know I’m around
Hop out, hit ‘em up, lay my murder game down
You see me in ya projects, 187’s in progress
Hard niggas finna’ soften up when that lead touch ‘em
You cut ‘em once and keep fightin’, fuck it just keep cuttin’ em

— Traditional Thanksgiving ballad

The only blemish on Thanksgiving was the gangsta rap that blared from a neighbor’s house for a couple of hours around noon. Thankfully, my four-year-old had tired of yardwork by the time the noise erupted across the street, or else I might have found myself struggling to explain the meaning of such glittering gems of American culture as cap busting, motherfuckers, and cold forty-ounce bottles of malt liquor, to say nothing of fine ho asses and the tapping thereof.

Now, I live in a pretty well-mixed neighborhood of whites, blacks, and a smattering of Asians, but it’s not even close to the ‘hood. The funny part is that the perpetrator of this aural assault is a fellow lily-white denizen of the suburbs. There are a half-dozen houses on my street that black teenagers call home, but they’re all crackers compared to this kid. Really, none of the black teens are exactly in the "urban" demographic; they’re all just suburban teenagers. Then there’s Whitey across the street. He’s got the phat spinna rims. He wears the bling. And he’s definitely down with Thug Life, or so his car stereo proclaims.

Despite my initial inclination to scowl at the ludicrous stream of inner-city rage pouring from Whitey’s window into an otherwise cheerful, peaceful slice of suburbia, I couldn’t help but break into a smile at the sheer ridiculousness of his affectation. The more I listened, the funnier it seemed, though I would have been loath to have my kids pick up on any of it. At length, just as I was dumping the last bit of leaves into the bin, Whitey’s mother came home, and the music abruptly ceased with indistinct but audible laments of the "aw, mom!" variety. This, of course, made the juxtaposition that much more amusing, I thought, as I walked back inside to finish cooking.

A orderly lawn, light comedy before a good dinner with family, a long, restful weekend: plenty to be thankful for.