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feet talents
Thursday, November 23 2006
People started showing up for our Thanksgiving at around 4pm. We had a roaring fire and a good spread of entirely vegan hors d'oeuvres. By the time our meal started, there were so many people at our table that I had to go downstairs twice on chair-fetching errands. One couple (friends from Eagle's Nest) were stopping in on their way to dinner, while another couple (Buddhists from Rosendale) came by on their way from dinner. The rest of us were there for the whole shebang. Our friends J & Brook from High Falls stayed for over two hours despite J's extreme cat allergies. By the end there he was taking hits from his inhaler and it was clear he needed to evacuate. The only reason I know he made it home okay was that I'm on his email list for his various political and cultural spam initiatives, one of which found its way to my inbox at 7:30pm.
Meanwhile back in front of the fire, I discovered a talent I hadn't known I had. My discovery started with me casually opening the Guatemala-themed Bic lighter on the coffee table and lighting it using only my toes. That was pretty unremarkable, I thought, but everyone was remarking on it anyway, how unusually dexterous I was with my big unphotogenic drumstick-shaped toes. At some point someone freaked out because I was passing my toes back and forth over the flame, allowing the thick skin on their ventral surfaces to blacken with lighter fluid smoke. This person snatched the lighter away, leaving my idle toes to cast about more widely in their desire to serve in the devil's workshop.
This was when I discovered that my feet's talents were truly remarkable. Somehow I managed to pick up a small box of wooden matches (the kind given out by fancy restaurants for free), open it up, pluck out a single wooden match, close the box, and strike it using only my toes. I thought this was a fluke, so I went to try again, and this time plucked out a match much more quickly than I had the first time. I would have struck it too, but it broke before I could. With my third match, I was able to pull it out, strike it, and light a candle before the flame started burning me painfully and I was forced to fling the match away.
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