The Chronicles Of Nay

Happy Tuesday! I hope that everyone is having a good week, had a good weekend. I know that it is no where near a turkey type holiday however my mom and I were talking about freezer space and two different turkey stories came up and we laughed very hard at them so here there are for you! haha

I know that a lot of us have phone numbers that we put in at the register to get discounts. I find this to be a very interesting and archaic way of doing this because what happens when we change phone numbers. No one ever changes that rewards number. Now I don’t know about you but don’t we all have a phone number we are using that we no longer have? However, I guess we do it this way because otherwise it would be a whole new number we would have to memorize! Anyway not what this story is about, growing up we had a problem. For whatever reason our home phone number didn’t work. Since ours didn’t work we were using my grandmas number.

Do you remember back in the day (I always feel so old when I use that saying) when Safeway (Tom Thumb) used to have a special around the holidays? The special was something like if you spent $200 (or some amount of money) you got a free turkey. Well that is where our story starts. We went grocery shopping for the Thanksgiving meal, we went grocery shopping as a family. I guess my parents thought if one of them had to do it we all had to! haha, So we got all the fixings, the potatoes, the vegetables the stuffing, the desserts… everything! We get to the register we pay our magic dollar amount that gets us a free turkey, We put in my grandmas reward number, we take our turkey and groceries and go home. We are just living our lives none the wiser until Thanksgiving day. When we were younger we would go to my Uncle Kiko’s house on Thursday and then on Friday my mom would do all the Thanksgiving things again and we usually had her side of the family over. Anyway, we are all sitting around eating our feast when my grandma starts to tell a story. She tells us how she went to go get a lot of the food for this meal. She was adding it all up she said she went to the register and they charged her for her turkey. So she asked the lady, “I thought the turkey was free? Did I not spend enough?” the lady tells her that she only gets 1 turkey per loyalty number. My grandma was like yeah I get that but look I just have one turkey. The lady told her she already got her turkey. As my grandma is telling us this the four of us realize what happened. I am looking at my parents like 👀 my dad is looking at me like 🤫, my mom is trying really hard not to laugh 🤭 and just keeps eating Gav is like 🤔. Come to find out my grandma made a SCENE at Safeway that she didn’t get her turkey that year and she spent the money. so, after a very long time and what I can only imagine a very loud conversations with the manager, they gave her one. Oops… our bad. I remember my dad telling my uncle later when my grandma got up from the table that we got her turkey! I mean it is funny because we had no idea she would get the turkey, usually my aunt made the turkey! Oh man! We still laugh about that. Sometimes the story comes up too when I steal the Kroger gas points! haha

So story two: Let me introduce the characters to you! There was an old guy that lived across the street from my family and his name was Jack. Years before we had another guy on the block named Jake so we called the old guy across the street “Old Man Jack” (I know… super original! haha). Jack lived with his wife Hazel and their daughter Mel sometimes stayed there. Gav played baseball with a kid named Jack. He had a younger brother, (I have a funny story about him and my dad I will put that on the list for another blog!) and a couple older sisters. The other bit of information you need to know is that most of my life my parents have had a deep freeze (or 2) with meet and chile and stuff.

So this particular year we got our turkey before thanksgiving and for whatever reason there wasn’t room in our freezer for the turkey. I don’t know the exact details but all that is important is we didn’t have room for a turkey and we weren’t ready to eat it! So my parents come up with the plan to call old man Jack and ask him if there was room in his freezer for a couple months until we could clear out ours. My mom picks up her phone and calls the “Jack” in her contacts. A woman answers and she asks “can I talk to Jack?” the woman says sure Jack says “hello?” my launches in to her spiel: “Hey Jack, this is Dorothy, we just picked up a turkey and we don’t have room in our freezer. Do yall have room for us to store it in your freezer for a couple months till we can make some room?” Jack says “Um, Proboably… let me ask my mom!” You know those videos that are like at this moment she knew she messed up? Well… My mom starts “omg! I am so sorry This is the wrong Jack!” but before she can get that out Jack shouts what we assume is across the house “MOM! CAN DOROTHY STORE A TURKEY IN OUR FREEZER FOR A COUPLE MONTHS!?” My mom is like “I am so sorry this is the wrong Jack never mind!” he was like “oh no problem! My mom said we have room so if you need to you can!” My mom got off the phone dying! I can only imagine Jack getting off the phone and being like “why would Gavin’s mom call me and not my mom!?!?!” hahaha So my mom called Old Man Jack and we were able to store the turkey there.

However, the story doesn’t end there. One day my parents are sitting around just watching tv or whatever they do. And Mel knocks on the door with two plates of food liek turkey mashed potatoes and all the fixins. It was not a holiday just like a random Saturday. She said here my dad said to bring yall some food! My parents are like um… Thanks? I mean they ate it because who doesn’t eat blessing food? Fast forward another month or so my parents run in to old Man Jack out in the yard and my dad says “Hey Jack! (we didn’t call him Old man Jack to his face!!!) I think we have room for that turkey now!” Jack looks at them and says “oh we cooked it! Mel took yall some didn’t she?” My parents just stood there 😮😯. They were like “oh yeah, ok. Thanks.” hahaha Man that dang turkey was a pain from day one! haha

I know these stories were random but my mom and I have laughed about them a lot and they came up again recently so I thought I would share! haha anyway, I am in the middle of a good book so I am going to go read that! I hope that you all have a great rest of your week!