The Turkey Drop

I’d never heard of this term (or obviously seen the movie) but I find the concept fascinating.

Finish high school; spend the summer with your best girl, then that emotional departure to college in a distant land (or the next state). A few cards and letters and perhaps a text or two, but you are too busy with college studies while she is still at home wearing your oversized letter sweater and heavy waxed graduation ring. A infrequent phone call; when you can’t say what you want to say and are forgetting the sound of the voice at the other end. Days go by. Life goes on.

After a few weeks of being apart from each other entwined bodies, fall break arrives. Time to come home for Thanksgiving with the family. And your significant other is waiting.

If experiencing college women has tainted your desire for your former main squeeze, the meeting will be awkward.

It seems breaking up at the first fall holiday (approximately 8 weeks after that emotional departure) is a thing. Time to say “Goodbye” to pimple anxiety, first drunkenness and wet underpants to become adults. It is time for adventures. It is time to explore new horizons. Distance doesn’t make the heart grow fonder.

Pictures will be burned. Sweaters will be thrown away (or sold to second hand store). Silly trinkets and heavy rings go to the dump for they are so high school. Cards will not be sent at Christmas.

If we were taught about the Turkey Drop earlier, we could prepare for the inevitable. Why don’t they have classes in this instead of Algebra?

Though an interesting thought, the ‘turkey drop’ doesn’t just happen at Thanksgiving. Sometimes you just arrive home to a surprise ‘turkey drop’. Sometimes you are served a ‘turkey drop’ from a lawyer. Sometimes you drop the turkey.

Hoping this festive season of feasting and gorging and battling over the remote and political nonsense that the ‘Turkey Drop’ won’t happen to increase the mania of the event we call ‘Thanksgiving’ (at least for now).