Thanksgiving edition

By tradition, the Norris clan travels to North Portland, Maine, every Thanksgiving, to celebrate with lifelong friends and former Rhode Islanders, the Conforti family. One year, after clearing plates cleaned of turkey, walnut-and-wild rice stuffing, gravy, cranberry sauce (both homemade and canned), sweet potato, antipasto, Italian Wedding soup, roasted chestnuts, green beans, carrots, squash, pies of pumpkin, apple, pecan (and occasionally strawberry rhubarb), glasses of red wine and ale, and cups of coffee, my father reached into his pockets, spilling the future of Thanksgiving onto the dining room table.
Pills, in bottles and bowls, tumbled onto the tablecloth. They made small piles of harvest colors – sienna capsules, egg-yellow ovals, oblong blues and breath mint-sized medicine colored orange, white, beige and blue-green.
“This is for my prostate,” Dad said, swallowing three orange ovals. He paused for effect, a twinkle in his eye. “And this is for my colon.” Three big beige capsules disappeared in a mouthful.
Our friend Joe joined in the chant, whenever he heard the appropriate affliction.
“This is for my arthritis.” Three white capsules vanished while Dad reached for something blue.
“This is for my depression.” Something yellow next. “This is for my blood pressure.” Then he held up a pill called ginkgo biloba and tapped his head. “For my memory.”
Fingers plunged into another bowl, grasping a vitamin C and two echinacea capsules.
“For the cold I’m fighting.”
The drug store Thanksgiving lasted as long as the feast.
“This comes from African tree bark,” said Dad, holding up his final pill.
Then Joe: “These use flower pollen from an unpolluted part of Sweden.”

Leading of course to this week’s question: What was your funniest or most memorable Thanksgiving experience?

When Size Meets Universe
Here at Half Shell, we believe in the separation of church and state, but not when it involves the “size of Rhode Island.” The following items referencing the research of Smithsonian astronomer Margaret Geller were plucked from the Web sites The Real Truth, maintained by the Restored Church of God and Watchtower, the online site for Jehovah’s Witnesses. (For those who don’t like proselytizing, we’ll keep the links a mystery. Feel free to Google away to your heart’s content.)

1) Made in the 1980s, the first 3-D visualization of the universe was chosen for the northern sky. Although that survey covered a spectrum of [more than] 500 million light years, Geller likened this panorama to trying to visualize the structure of the continents and the oceans of the earth by examining a map the size of Rhode Island.

2) Interpretations of cosmic structure on the basis of current mapping of the heavens are far from definitive – more like trying to picture the whole world from a survey of Rhode Island, USA.

Not for nothin’, but here in the birthplace of G.I. Joe, Dee Dee Myers and religious freedom, the notion of picturing the whole world from the vantage point of Rhode Island doesn’t sound that far-fetched.