Driving through the foothills of South Carolina is not my favorite thing to do.

Of course, every year we’re expected to drive through those hills to go and visit our great uncle Gary.

Uncle Gary’s one of those rare gems you come across in life; apparently, he remembers the end of the Civil War, fought in WWI, WWII, Korea, and Vietnam and had a foot fungus named after him in some medical book.

At least that’s how he tells it; whether or not it’s complete tripe is of no consequence, since he honestly doesn’t care if his stories contradict each other or if anyone even calls him on it.  He just keeps right on jawing away, his toothless lips flapping.

It’s not that I dislike Uncle Gary; on the contrary, I find the visits extremely entertaining.  I mean, where else could you go to find a house that STILL, in 2008, doesn’t have indoor plumbing?  Or find someone who’s so religiously devoted to his old-country sayings such as “don’t spit in a cat’s eye or someone close to you will die at midnight,” or “don’t get your feet wet after October 15^th, or you’ll catch the rheumatism,” or, my personal favorite, “California, eh?  So you one of them funnyboys?”

Yeah.  Uncle Gary’s great.

Going up to Uncle Gary’s shack is what my sister and I like to call “going up to Time Warp Mountain.”  Besides the afore-mentioned lack of indoor plumbing, there’s always the absolutely great yard full of absolute junk.  And when I say absolute junk, I mean that even though the stuff in Gary’s yard is all about a hundred years old, no antique dealer in the world would go near it for fear of tetanus or a spontaneous raccoon attack.

Uncle Gary’s fence is made of old car fenders, some of them still with the license plates attached, and his gate is a metal headboard of an old bed.  At least six cars sit in Gary’s yard, and just looking at them out of the corner of your eye is probably enough to give you a case of lockjaw.  It’s like someone dunked them in salt-water for about a month and then left them sitting around like some bizarre art neuveau exhibit.

There are three washing machines, though the place has never been wired for electricity, and I remember as a kid a particularly pissed-off polecat (that’s skunk to those of you uninitiated) that squirted me right in the face when I invaded his washing-machine den.

Took a week to get the stench out of my clothes.

Anyway, Gary’s yard is full of too many things to talk about, so I’ll just let your imagination fill in the rest.  Think of Sanford and Son, but with less room to walk around.

So, Thanksgiving; that’s the day we go and visit Uncle Gary, after we’ve all flown in from the various parts of the country we escaped to, to visit our parents.  My sister lives with her husband in Rhode Island, where they run a little bed and breakfast and charge the tourist outlandish fees, which the tourists are dumb enough to pay.  I live in California with a dog and a cat and a computer and a drafting table.  I work from home as a graphic designer.  You know those ads on TV with the beard guy, who’s always talking about cleaning your clothes with the power of oxygen?  A lot of people don’t know it, but he’s not actually real; he’s computer-generated.  I designed him.  (You can tell he’s not real if you look at his beard…)

Anyway, we’re always expected to fly out to South Carolina for Thanksgiving and Christmas because we’re rich (apparently,) and our parents live on a pension and can’t afford to come out to see us, and Dad has a heart condition, and he can’t travel, and Mom has the diabeetus (she says it just like that; I’m always looking around to see if Wilford Brimley is hiding somewhere around the corner,) and we’re RICH, so we can AFFORD IT.

So we fly out every year, and then the first thing we have to do is see Grandma and Grandpa and Nana and Geegaw and Pappy and Pippy and Popeye and Poopdeck and about fifty other relatives with completely ridiculous pet names they saw fit to bestow upon themselves, because apparently no matter how old we get or how RICH we are, we’re still friggin’ seven years old and go in for that stuff.

We all gather in our parents’ tiny, cramped trailer, and then there’s dinner, which isn’t ever that bad, except for the fact that my mother has never, ever, not once, made a turkey that seemed to have any juice left in it, and the fact that everything on the table is sugar free and fat free and cholesterol free, so there’s really only about three dishes you feel brave enough to try to eat, and there are always way too many relatives gathered around the table, so you’re always in danger of someone’s elbow wandering into your eye.

That is, of course, if you’re not relegated to the kids’ table in the next room because great-aunt Lilly decided to drag her seven-hundred-pound bulk over for Thanksgiving.

Actually, being sent to the kids’ table isn’t that bad; last year, my sister, her husband, all the kids and I had a really bitchin’ food fight.

After dinner, my sister and I always get to wash the dishes; it really gives us a great incentive to want to come to dinner, y’know?  Anyway, after the dishes are done and the last relative has finished kissing my sister on the cheek and shaking their heads in disappointment at me and departed, we all get to pile in the 1992 Ford Aerostar, which by now is pretty much held together by spit and wishes, and go clanking up the road on our way to Uncle Gary’s house.  Last year Dad took out the back seat to make room for the tools he never uses anymore, and so I got to sit on a paint bucket the entire three-hour car ride, praying the whole time we would get in a head-on collision with a semi just so I wouldn’t have to sit on the bucket anymore.  It leaked and ruined my nice pants.

This year wasn’t really any different; crowded dinner, though I at least got to sit at the grown-up table, dishes, and then piling in the van… which was STILL missing the back @&*#ing seat.  (I threw an ancient and stinky plaid shirt over the paint bucket this time, though; stink gets out of clothes easier than paint.)

After jouncing along up the freeway for two hours, we turned off onto the “unimproved” roads that led to Time Warp Mountain.  “Unimproved” really only means “one step above having to drive through a river, although really have you SEEN that bridge?  You’re probably better off getting wet.  Also, rocks.”

One thing about Time Warp Mountain: there was always, without fail, every year, a tree that had fallen in the road.  This year was, of course, no exception.  When we were younger, I was always expected to go out and help Dad pick up whatever had fallen in the road and move it out of the way of the vehicle, and as I got older, Dad expected me to start moving entire trees by myself, because he had a bad back and a heart condition.

So while everybody was sitting all toasty-warm in the van, my sister’s husband and I had to get out and move a tree.  I got sap all over my jacket.  Dad frowned at me when I complained about it and told me to be thankful it was just a stupid jacket and not something important like my mother’s nice white dress. (Which really, made no sense, as I would never wear Mom’s dresses for any reason, though try and argue anything with your parents.  No, really, go on; I’ll be back here watching and laughing.)  Now, you know, normally I’d not really care either, but this was a $300 Tommy Hilfiger leather jacket.  Ah, well, I could probably get it out with some of the moonshine Uncle Gary kept stashed in his shed…

So after we had damn near thrown out our backs, we climbed back in the vehicle and continued on up the hill… only to be confronted by a SECOND tree.

This was shaping up to be a fine Thanksgiving, indeed.

When we finally arrived at Uncle Gary’s, it was well after dark, but there the old coot was, standing out by his rusty bedpost gate, cackling in insane glee.

We all went inside his shack to the warmth of the Franklin stove and huddled around it, burning our faces and freezing our backsides.

Uncle Gary called me to come out back with him and prepare the turkey (really, I never figured out why the man would wait until we got there to begin preparing it every year,) and I went reluctantly.

The turkey stood in a wire chicken coop with a few mangy-looking hens, cocking a belligerent eye at me and Uncle Gary.  He was a fat old bird, and he looked pretty tough.  My job was to hold the turkey while Gary swung the axe.  Even though I’d had to do this with Gary for years, I was always expecting him to slip and behead me as well as the tom.

So I held the turkey down, and while it scratched deep gouges in my nice leather jacket with its claws, Gary swung the axe and killed it.  Like a chicken, a turkey will flop around for a while if you don’t catch it.  Gary caught it and pinned it to the side of the shed with some nails through its wings.

Let me tell you, if you want a creepy friggin’ image to take away from Thanksgiving, just watch a headless, crucified turkey kicking its feet for fifteen minutes.

After the turkey was in the oven, Uncle Gary sat down in his favorite chair, which looked like some sort of medieval torture device, it had so many springs sticking out of it, and started talking about how easy we all had it, what with our toilets and our televisions and our movie theaters and whatnot, and when he was a boy, he had had to live in post-Civil War Virginia and shoot carpet-baggers and men from the collection agency, and then he had to go away and fight in The Big One against the Krauts and the Ottomans and them murderous huns, and on and on until the turkey was done.

At dinner, Uncle Gary poured us all a cup of moonshine, which he had done every year since I was ten, and after we had all chucked the greasy, nightmarish stuff back, he clapped me on my shaking back and called me a sissy-boy because I couldn’t take a drop of the old scratch.

“California’s turned you into a dandy, boy!” He cawed while I gagged on what I assumed was pure kerosene.

The next day, our parents drove us to the airport and Mom shrieked hysterically over me, begging me to give up my life of sin in California and come back home and take over the family construction business, which had of course gone under when I was eleven, and Dad shook hands with me and grunted and told me not to get mixed up with “them weirdos out west,” which was the same admonition he had given me at the end of every visit and phone call for the last fifteen years.

I hugged my sister and shook hands with her husband and my sister gave me an envelope, telling me not to open it until we got on the plane.

After the plane was in the air, I opened it and two photographs fell out: One of me and her husband trying to get the second tree of the road, and an ultrasound image dated one week before Thanksgiving, in which I could just make out a tiny head.

I was going to be an uncle.