My Darling B plans to serve a huge turkey with stuffing for dinner today and decided to prepare it by soaking it in a big stock pot filled with a mixture of water, soy sauce, sugar and various herbs. She lined the pot with a big plastic bag and asked me to help her get the turkey, an enormous twelve-pound sixteen-pound monster, into the pot without tearing the bag. I didn’t have to do much besides say a few magic words. It was so easy I wondered why she needed me, but I don’t ask questions, I just come when I’m called and don’t leave until I’ve done my duty.

I was in the living room with T-Dawg giving him an eyeful of the homoerotic irony of the scene in South Pacific when dozens of shirtless sailors sing “There Is Nothing Like A Dame.” The big guy in the crop-top t-shirt was bellowing the signature line of the song when B began to very loudly and urgently call for help from the kitchen. We both went running.

B had the bagged turkey on the countertop where she dumped it when she decided that what it really needed was to be mixed up real good, and the best way to do that was roll it around it should be mixed up and that the best way to do that was to take it out of the pot and roll it around a bit. It was a great idea, except the bag either wasn’t thick enough or the turkey poked a pinfeather through it. Either way, it sprung a leak and when we got there, a pool of sauce was growing around it while B stood by, begging for help getting it back into the pot.

The quickest way to do this, I figured, was to let gravity do most of the work, so I grabbed the pot and braced it under the far edge of the counter, then asked B to slide it over and let it drop straight into the pot. Great idea, right? And I’m pretty sure it would have worked, except that B hung on to the bag when gravity grabbed the turkey and pulled it right out through the bottom, leaving a gallon of sticky goop to free-fall into the stock pot, which was unfortunately almost entirely filled up by the turkey. With nowhere to go, it hit the turkey and exploded like a bomb all over me, B, the kitchen cabinets and just about everything within eyeshot.

Cleanup took the better part of an hour. Timbers dragged the dirty towel hamper from the bathroom and we used the towels as combination throw rugs and sponges to pick up most of the mess, making that part of the clean-up relatively easy. The part that took longest was triaging all the kitchen bric a brac. Just about every last salt shaker, wine glass and ceramic chicken had to be cleaned off, either by wiping it down with a vinegar-soaked rag or giving up and chucking it into the dishwasher. We got most of it, but I’m sure we’ll be finding soy-spattered items, some of them inexplicably far from the kitchen, for weeks to come.