SWEET TEA: Ticked-off turkey tuff to swallow

LITTLE ROCK — To remind you, Willie Perkins is the public address system disguised as a greeter at the front of the Maumelle Wal-Mart, the one who bumps your fist and fog-horns, “Bam,” then “All right now.”

One day I met up with Willie at Millennium Bowl. I was armed with a bad bowling joke and dangerous. (Just so you’ll know, 300 is the highest score you can bowl; that’s a perfect game.)

Don’t blame Willie for this; he was an innocent bystander:

Sweet Tea to Willie: “Did you hear about the bowler who scored three hundred and won?”

Willie, perplexed and uncharacteristically quiet: “You can’t bowl three hundred and one.”

Sweet Tea: “Well, you can’t bowl three hundred and lose.”

Willie: Laughs.

Then Willie knocks down eight pins with a 9.93 miles-per-hour roll.

Bam.

There is this woman I knew a long time ago, in another life.

I didn’t know her the Thanksgiving this happened. I was, in fact, only 2 or 3 years old. But she’s told the story so often, sometimes I think I was eye witness.

She was living with her six kids in a hard-packed Texas outback with the unlikely name Elysian Fields, which sounds like something from Roman mythology, which, in fact, it is.

If there was a mythic element to their life, however, it was the hardship. Dirt for salt in their shakers. Baking sodie for brushing teeth.

This particular Thanksgiving, they had a turkey, a wild one, alive and penned out back of the house, awaiting execution.

But somehow the bird bolted and headed for the woods. The oldest boy, a teenager, bolted right after the bird, shotgun at the hand, the mighty deerslayer in leather stockings, hot on the trail of supper.

By the time he had treed the turkey and fired several shots wide, his mother, this woman I knew a long time ago, arrived. She snatched the shotgun from Natty Bumpo, and to Natty’s everlasting shame, she knocked the bird out of the tree with one shot.

Tuffest turkey she ever ate - tuff is tuffer than tough - which she blamed on Natty, who had made the gobbler mad, and a ticked-off turkey is always tuff.

Combine thanks and giving, you have a noun.

Capitalize the T, and you have the name of a holiday, a word so familiar, we forget its literal meaning.

So to reinvigorate the word, I sawed the 12 letters of “thanksgiving” down the vertical middle and reconstituted them in their original form as thanks and giving.

I took a hatchet, then, to the “ing,” substituting an “e” on the tail of “giving” to make it “give.” Then I reversed the order of the two, and, viola!, new life for an old word as a gentle suggestion.