Phthanksgiving Musings: Goodman & Grouse

It was Thanksgiving Day, and I was 17 or 18 or 19, and I was in the car and I had WXRX on. WXRX would do a “triple shot Turkey Day weekend”, meaning that they would play three songs in a row from every artist.

So it was noon and I must have been going from one family gathering to another and, per a Thanksgiving tradition which I had never heard of before, WXRX played Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree”.

I thought about this recently, and I think I was thinking about the idea of shared social traditions, or maybe I was just thinking about how insane it is that somehow that song is the one which has persisted as a tradition.

I introduced the song within our family a few years ago while driving to Rockford on Thanksgiving. Michelle had never heard of such a tradition and maybe wasn’t even familiar with the song at all!

So we played the song again today somewhere around Marengo and a voice from the backseat expressed various sentiments, including disbelief that this was actually a song at all, and also at one point the word “terrible”.

Such are the best of family traditions!

We can use bluetooth in our Prius but it has a hard time switching between our phones, and when we got in the car this morning it was looking for my phone. And I didn’t have a Thanksgiving playlist ready, so I chose what seemed the closest thing, the “Arboretum Day” playlist, which for some reason had a lot of Prince in it, plus that one Eminem song that inexplicably got added to every single playlist a couple years ago.

The playlist eventually churned through to Steve Goodman’s “City of New Orleans”, and Michelle commented that it seemed like a Thanksgiving song. Well…

Remember how WXRX did a triple play Turkey day weekend? This meant that they had to play two more Arlo Guthrie songs that day. They played “The Motorcycle Song” and… “City of New Orleans”.

So I submit to you all that if you’re looking for a new family tradition for Thanksgiving, you should just go with “City of New Orleans”. But go with the original. A lot of people have covered it but nobody’s ever done it better than Steve Goodman, not even Arlo.

I looked up flags with turkeys on them, and considered trying to offer a flag from a municipality in the country of Turkey, but then decided to look for alternate fowl, and I found this gem. Your Phthanksgiving Flag is from Lierne, Norway:

This square gem features three willow ptarmigans which it is claimed contain a “tincture of argent”, and my god if we don’t all need a tincture of argent these days to hold our heads high.

The willow ptarmigan is not only local to Lierne, it is also the state bird of Alaska!

As for Lierne, there is a national park there with a whole lot of brown bears. Imagine a flag with three brown bears and three argent-tinctured ptarmigans!

Ptarmigans are grouses, by the way, and grouse seems like a perfect word for Thanksgiving, because it can mean complain, but it’s also Australian slang for excellent.

I hope you didn’t have much occasion to grouse this Thanksgiving, and instead you had a grouse holiday.

I’m closing the night out listening to Steve Goodman’s first album. Maybe you should too!