The Sentinel, Turkeys 201124

      There are several kinds of turkeys which I will cover in this story. There are wild turkeys, domestic turkeys, people who are called turkeys, the country Turkey and Wild Turkey (the whiskey).

      Before men domesticated turkeys, they were a very intelligent bird and wild turkeys still are. Ben Franklin lobbied for the wild turkey to be our national symbol, but we got the eagle instead. A wild turkey knows all it needs to know to survive from the time it hatches out of the egg. They know what to eat, what predators to avoid and even have a sense of loss when they encounter other turkeys found dead in the woods. We humans don’t know much at all when we are born and some of us never learn to be self sufficient. Wild male turkeys are very smart until it comes to mating and then they like male humans get very stupid until they succeed or get killed.
      Domestic turkeys are possibly the dumbest creatures on the planet, with the possible exception of the gooney bird on Midway Island. Domestic turkeys will run into a fire to see where the light is coming from; they will look up with an open mouth in the rain and drown. I heard that from a friend who worked on a domestic turkey farm.
      Men who are not the brightest light in the closet are often referred to as turkeys, or they used to be before political correctness in the workplace.
      The country of Turkey is well known these days, so enough said about it.
      Finally Wild Turkey the whiskey. There’s not any smoother or better in my mind, that I could afford. Good whiskey is never cheap, cheap whiskey is never good. This reminds me of an old navy story. My friend and crewmate Cal and I went to town in the Philippines one evening. We stopped at the navy exchange and got a bottle of Ron Rico 151 proof rum on our way out of the base. We drank that, drank a lot of beer and I for yet a still unknown reason went to a local grocery and bought a full pint of some whiskey. It cost 15 centavos (perhaps less than a nickel in US money) I drank that too. I have no idea how we made it back to the naval base, but we did. We stopped at the navy exchange and bought some chocolate milk as we usually did to calm the stomach and it did. I woke up the next morning, opened my eyes and thought I had gone blind. All I could see was a faint sense of white light from the overhead. It took about an hour before I could see images and later in the day I had my vision back. That scared me when it happened. I found out later the other sailors bought that and used it to fuel their cigarette lighters because it was cheaper than regular lighter fluid. Lesson well learned!