Tag Archives: skeleton

Debone

Debone: (v) to remove the bones from meat, fish or fowl

“Keep your eye on the prize.”

It is a phrase that normally is applied to noble ventures promoting moral fiber or spiritual ecstasy.

But I shall now trivialize it.

Because one of the duties I certainly hate on Thanksgiving Day is deboning the turkey

I don’t know why.

I think the main reason may be that by the time I get to the job of deboning the turkey, I am so sick of eating turkey that the sight and touch of it is annoying.

But it always falls my lot to do this particular job. I think it’s because most people share my dismay over defrocking the fowl. So to keep themselves from being drafted for the duty, they offer praise to someone else (that being me).

“No one does it like you, Dad!”

“You find all the meat that’s hiding away, in all the nooks and crannies, behind the bone and cartilage…”

So I keep my eye on the prize.

The duty is made more pleasant by the notion of having a big bowl of loose turkey flesh in the refrigerator that can be grabbed in handfuls, put on a plate, lightly salted and consumed in tiny chunks of delicacy.

Actually, I like cold turkey better than hot turkey.

And I like deboned turkey better than the kind that sits beautifully upright on the table, held together by its skeleton.

Yet I would never recommend going “cold turkey.”

It’s my understanding that it has other definitions.

Bone

Bone: (n) pieces of hard, whitish tissue making up the skeleton

I just stared at it.Dictionary B

It was a source of amazement and confusion to me.

When my son was struck down by a hit-and-run driver, he suffered a compound fracture of his femur–the largest bone in the body.

It was ugly.

But as tragic as that may seem, it wasn’t nearly as devastating as the brain injury he suffered–a trauma that left him unable to communicate, living in a vegetative state.

Sometimes I would come into his room and stare at his leg. Because over the weeks of tragedy and travail, that bone healed.

It had no reason to.

It wasn’t attached anymore to a leg that was going to think of somewhere to go and then move quickly in that direction.

It wasn’t part of a body that was functioning with any sense of reason.

But it healed–not completely straight, but it joined together.

It left me with feelings of praise, anger, frustration and awe.

How fearfully and wonderfully we are made, said a great songwriter.

Wonderfully in the sense that bones that break can be set to heal.

But fearfully because in a moment of madness, all our sensibilities … can be smashed.

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Anything

dictionary with letter A

Anything: (pron) used to refer to a thing, no matter what

If you’ve ever parented teenagers, this response is probably one of your pet peeves.

If you ask them a question of any sort, they will either ignore you or reply, “I guess anything’s OK.”

I grew weary of this.

So one night when I asked my teenage sons what they wanted to have for dinner, and they replied, “anything,” I complied.

I went out to a neighbor’s trash can and pulled out the cast-aside leftovers of their previous lunch–some half-eaten sandwiches already drawing the interest of a couple of ants, the skeleton of a fish, and believe it or not, some broken pieces of pumpkin shell.

I found two bottles of partially consumed Coca-Cola, put it all on a platter, set plates, silverware and called them to dinner.

At first they were in such a state of oblivion that they didn’t recognize the placement set before them as being basically inedible, but perched in their chairs and reached for their cell phones.

So adding to the comedy of the moment, I asked one of them to offer grace. It was at this point that the child felt the need to look at the food, in order to determine the length and intensity of the prayer. Amazingly, he did not gaze at me in horror, but rather, looked at the spread before him, perplexed, shook his heads, and began to pray:

“Thanks for the food and the hands that prepared it, and for this day. In Jesus name, amen.”

Finishing the prayer, they both stared at the food–or shall I say, the “remains of the day”–and then looked at me quizzically, asking, “What is it?”

I smiled, grabbed my fork and spoon and touted, “It’s anything. Dig in.”

 

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Acetabulum

by J. R. Practix

dictionary with letter A

Acetabulum: (n.)  the socket of the hipbone, into which the head of the femur fits. SPECIAL USAGE: any cup-shaped structure, espcially a sucker.

Skeletons freak me out.

I think I talked about this a few days ago–the idea that we have an “inside” to our “outside” often leaves me beside myself.

Especially when you realize how we’re constructed both in a practical–but also in a weird way. This is never so true as when you look at that socket for the hip–the way it kind of rolls around in there, appearing to have absolutely no practical way to function.

So when I get in a room with a person advocating the theory of evolution over anything else, and an individual who insists on a literal interpretation of the Genesis creation story, I am baffled at how both of them fail to recognize how “fearfully and wonderfully” the human being is made.

I don’t care if there were billions of years of evolution–there is NO way that a single cell could EVER become a hip bone.

I‘m sorry. It’s impossible.

Somewhere along the line, there were LEAPS. What caused those leaps? I know that scientists have their own rendition of the mutations and interventions of nature, which may have instigated such spannings of the chasm. But honestly, when I look at an acetabulum and how it functions–how it rolls and how it’s supposed to last for a LONG time–I am massively in awe.

I guess I am one of those freaks who just believes that it’s ALL true. My concept of God is that He is kind of like a tourist visiting New York City for the first time. He literally wears Himself out, running from one site to another, enjoying every single moment of the vacation, refusing to miss any possible hallmark of the experience.

I think God likes to do it all. I think God tinkered with the amoeba and I think God messed with people. I think He enjoys perfecting things instead of pursuing the perfect.

So when I look at that hip-joint (which I don’t like to do for very long, by the way) I am convinced that there is more that went into that particular invention than we could ever imagine on this earthly plane. In other words, it took the best of evolution, it took the best of intelligent design, it took the best of mutation and it took the best of creation.

The mistake that most people make with God is that they feel empowered by discovering who He is or who He isn’t, and then they box Him up.

There IS no box for God. The minute we tell Him that He can’t do something, He’s already done it. And the minute we’re convinced that He does not exist in any way, shape or form, He goes ahead and finds a form … to shape our way.

Accessorize

by J. R. Practix

dictionary with letter A

Accessorize: (v.) provide or complement (a garment) with fashion accessories: the leisure suits were accessorized with white vinyl loafers and matching belts.

I wouldn’t say that I lose sleep over it, but there is a certain amount of turmoil inside my brain when I try to figure out what to wear with my gray jogging pants with the white stripe down the side and the elastic waist band which no longer seems to be willing to be elastic. At that point, you’re grateful to have a belly which holds your pants up instead of having to trust that the original garment’s intention for retention will hold true…

First of all, I probably should apologize for calling them jogging pants, considering that I have never jogged in them and probably will never pursue such foolishness. So let me change the name to blogging pants, since I have blogged in them and probably will again.

The problem is that I don’t know what to wear with graying trousers. They require an accompaniment which is just a notch above their social strata. Otherwise people walk up on the street, hand me dollar bills and wish me good luck.

What I mean is that a pair of old pants demands a newer, hipper shirt–or the pants don’t seem to be an attempt at dressing down, but rather, an admission of pernicious poverty.

So I guess my favorite way to accessorize my aging gray blogging pants is to wear a black t-shirt (which my oldest son insisted had a skeleton on it, but really, I think is the embroidered head of a Klingon. Some people think there’s not much difference between a skeleton and a Klingon, but I would have to refer to those people as the personification of ignorance).

Shoes become important, too. My blogging pants are not really long enough to hide my socks when I’m sitting down, so therefore the shoes feel totally exposed to the outside world and need to be confident that they are being appreciated for their fine, soulful, “footery” nature.

A ball cap helps. The beautiful thing about wearing a baseball cap is that it tells people that you’re accessorizing towards a common humanity–but that you’re also willing to advertise some inane team or idea at the same time.

Actually, as you can see, for being an extraordinarily masculine straight man, I probably spend entirely too much time thinking about accessorizing. But if you followed THAT logic, golfers and bowlers–with their funny bright-colored pants and strange, plaid shirts–must be flaming queens.