Thanksgiving Dinner with Dr. No

After eating the aforementioned cake, I did end up at a traditional Thanksgiving dinner. The fete was hosted by my boss, a New Englander of the first water, and his friend, a tiny Canarian man with more money than most southern European countries. Even though the meal featured turkey, cranberries, stuffing, and pumpkin custard, there were certain things that stood out as distinctly Spanish. For one thing, the meal didn’t start until 9 at night, a common time for people here to eat dinner. Also, there were over 50 people in attendance. (It’s not a party if there’s fewer than 20.) There were appetizers made of various types of fish and bottles of wine everywhere. This was probably because the house we were at was situated in the middle of a vineyard.

Ruyman and I were the first people from the school to arrive, but more of my coworkers arrived later. They included a guy from Boston, a Polish woman with fantastic English, a Londoner and his Spanish girlfriend, a totally incomprehensible woman from Manchester, an Americanized man from Venezuela and his husband Heff, and a tall, blond woman from Wales. The mix of accents was a little too much for Ruyman, who didn’t understand a word anyone from the UK said. The rest of the guests were Spanish in language and origin and several tax brackets above us.

Somehow I always tilt just right to get up my nose.

 After everyone was finished eating and took a quiz on Thanksgiving origins (the American table lost by a miserable margin), Leslie took us on a tour of the house.  Besides the full-sized tennis court and the hotel-sized house, we visited a vast subterranean bunker called the bodega. (Contrary to what New Yorkers may think, a bodega is a wine cellar.) The doors were finished in the same flagstone as the rest of the house with a huge pressurized seal in the middle.

For some reason, I had the feeling that behind that door, there would be a bald man with a white cat sitting behind a desk and plotting the destruction of the world while monologuing to an entrapped James Bond. There was no cat or Bond villain, but there was definitely a desk and a lot of strange-looking machinery. I was disappointed to learn the machines were wine vats, rather than the control system for a orbiting death laser, but a girl can’t have everything. 

The party took a while to wind down, so we left at around two in the morning. We used the flashlight on Ruyman’s phone to light the way down the driveway, which was rather like an indifferently paved toboggan run. Another guest walked with us, definitely several bottles of vino worse for wear and sporting 5 inch stilettos. “I don’t know why they ask if I’m okay to drive,” she said, staggering just a little. “I’ve driven under the influence of... of... of everything before.” And she got in her car and zoomed off into the darkness. Considering I saw her at work the next day, I assume she had an uneventful trip home.

Okay, so it wasn’t a strictly traditional Thanksgiving. But it certainly was a memorable one.