November 26, 2003, 9:29 a.m.
The Good, the Bad & the Salty
A Thanksgiving ingredient list.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: This could be anyone's family ('cause I'm not saying it's mine).

BAD THINGS ABOUT THANKSGIVING

Pre-holiday tension because you're about to see all the people who can push your buttons like no one else can.

Your uncle's German shepherd who always bites someone.

That highly polished wooden stairway that someone in socks always slips on, occasionally triggering a chain reaction of feet shooting out into the backs of the knees of the person a couple of steps below until everyone comes down like a toboggan ride. The person who doesn't spill his/her drink is congratulated.

That touch football game that gets a overly aggressive in the second half. I mean tackling little girls, for Pete's sake.

The fact that when you're a kid you never get anything to eat except Coke and Planter's peanuts from a tin.

The fact that when you're a kid you miss all the good stuff happening at the grown-up table. Later, when you ask a grown up why everyone was yelling and crying, they say never mind.

The movie shown in the family room that always scares the kids half to death like The House on Haunted Hill where murders are committed with knitting needles and guillotines and you are afraid of the dark for years afterwards.

Or the time they showed The Naked Runner with Frank Sinatra and you watched the whole movie trying to find the naked guy and he never happened. Perhaps you are an adult now and you still don't know what the heck that movie was about.

GOOD THINGS ABOUT THANKSGIVING

The tree house.

The first half of the touch-football game.

Cousins.

Tractor rides.

That nice old lady with the brogue who's somehow related to you and is really good at warming hands.

Coke and peanuts.

Showing off your own kids and watching them play with your cousins' children.

Sitting at the grown-up table and finding everything has mellowed since the 1970s.

The ride home.

— Susan Konig, a journalist, has just written a book, Why Animals Sleep So Close to the Road (And Other Lies I Tell My Children), which will be published in 2004.

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