Thanksgiving and Feathers

Diplomad: Always one of my favorite holidays. Too bad the progs seek to ruin it. We won’t let that happen to us. The Diplowife and I will head off to Raleigh for a big Thanksgiving with the three Diplosons–Diplodaughter is in Texas–significant others, grandsons, and carefully chosen friends.  Undoubtedly, politics will provide the main topic of entertainment; none of us wants to watch any NFL nonsense. 

In light of these festivities, my posting will be light for a few days. I, however, leave you with a recounting of a Thanksgiving Day, long, long, long ago, in a place now much different . . . it’s a re-post from the past.

Feathers 

Yes, feathers. Not the figurative kind that fill leftoid heads, but the real kind that cover birds. We are going light today. Our topic is feathers and how they nearly produced a civil war in the Diplomad clan, and how echoes of that strife apparently will reverberate on the 4th of July.

As the six regular readers of this blog are painfully aware, during the Reagan years I served for a time at the UN in New York. We loved New York City, even with all its inconveniences especially with two rambunctious boys. Schooling was a problem as the local PS was, well, pretty bad. When two of the vastly overpaid teachers at the school told us that they would never send their own kids there, we decided to yank our boys out and send them–at considerable cost to the Diplomad bottom line–to private schools. One went to a school run by Irish Catholic nuns, who wanted no parental involvement, “Thank you very much, but we know how to do this.” The older son went to one run by strangely liberal, yet oddly conservative Jews who wanted lots of parental involvement in the school as long as the parents did what the school wanted. Hey, it’s New York. Live with it.

Well, as it does every year, the Thanksgiving holiday rolled around. You must understand we had spent most of our lives overseas. The boys had been born in Spain, and hardly had been in the US. Educated abroad, they–God help me–had grown to love soccer football soccer with both of them becoming (and remaining to this day) rabid fans of Spain’s La Furia Roja. Their grip on Americana was a bit weak. Please remember that as this saga proceeds. read more

h/t Systemically Confused.