Part One
CaptCliff has a special tradition on Thanksgiving. After we (the Mazer clan of Atlanta) pig out into a near comatose state of gluttony and uber-sloth, we all get together on the following day (Black Friday) not to “shop until we drop” but to help the homeless. We know we cant build them tidy new homes or provide them with expensive clothing, but we can feed them with tasty leftovers from our Thanksgiving feast.
Instead of a normal family sized butterball turkey, I purposely buy a mutant bird from Costco that is so large it barely fits in the oven and often has to be tied to the roof of the car when I leave the parking lot. Maybe its a conjoined Siamese turkey since everything at Costco is sold in multiples and in bulk. By cooking such an unusually large bird which has to be marinated using a standard size kitchen mop and Octomom’s mega-turkey baster syringe, we have enough leftover white meat and stuffing to make around 50 sandwiches for the homeless.
To be perfectly honest, the rest of our triple plastic bagged gift packages for the homeless are “filler” items, ie. cookies, cakes, crackers,etc. from one of my favorite nearby stores, Big Lots. In case you didn’t know, you can get a lot of cheap but fancy sounding European foods there that either have small dents on the packaging or are obscure brands that European people know not to eat. In contrast, Americans such as myself consider these same exact items “exotic” and therefore, possibly gourmet. Feeding the homeless requires not only great compassion and generosity, but also supreme confidence that none of them have been former contestants on Top Chef or were previous employees at Big Lots.
Cut to the chase…literally. We loaded up the Expedition with enough turkey sandwiches, apples, distilled water and Keebler cookies (the ones only sold in Belgium) to weigh down the back end to minimum clearance. We looked desperately for a Homeless Person phone “app” to link to my smart phone’s GPS, but none currently exist, even tho I know for a FACT that certain enterprising start-up companies are presently utilizing the homeless as advertising platforms and human billboards for their worthless Chinese made products. Instead we decided to do it “old school” and went cruising for the homeless. In other words we decided to use guile, logic, and gut intuition to track them down. Since man, regardless of his social status is a very social animal we deduced that groups of the homeless would tend to hang out together or “cluster” in small tribal bands, somewhat like Native Americans out West before we nearly exterminated them. After all, we also wanted to be relatively time efficient and didnt want to drag this whole “pay it forward” stuff out unnecessarily, or at least not to the point of missing an important football game on TV or something. Unfortunately, what lay in store for us this year was something that nobody, not even Nick Nolte would be able to predict.
captaincliff 