Turkey, family, and Native Americans. It’s a thanksgiving tale to warm hearts for the ages. Need a feel-good story? Read on.

Drove up to my parents’ place for Thanksgiving dinner. I’ll summarize it by saying the food and company were great, then reiterate the site policy of not blogging about friends and family unless they’re reading over my shoulder and nodding as I type.

On the drive home the isotopes started to interact with the turkey and stuffing, so I started looking for a place open on Thanksgiving where I could go inside and sit out the episode, and maybe read a short novel. But who could be so crassly commercial as to be open on Thanksgiving Day? Who else, but the Native Americans themselves?

I stopped at the Pechanga casino just south of Temecula and played games on the Palm for a while while stuffing, digestive enzymes and radioactivity battled for supremacy in my lower abdomen. Kind of like TV news channel debates (Crossfire et al), it goes on constantly, but there will probably never be a real winner. The sides posture a bit, things look testy, but then things calm down in time for a word from our sponsor and we all know everyone will be back tomorrow.

Since I was there and I’d already contaminated their facility, I figured I’d stop and make some reparations for the sins, wrongs, acts and omissions of my forefathers. I freely admit they’re the sins of my forefathers; my grandmother documented it well for her application to the Mayflower Society and I see no reason to be ashamed of it. To paraphase Spike in this morning’s rerun of Buffy: It’s not like Caesar would be running around saying I came, I saw, I conquered, I feel bloody bad about it. It’s history, it happened, and that’s that.

I looked for an appropriate place to express my regrets, and settled on a multi-hand deuces-wild video poker alter of contrition. I was planning on donating ten dollars or so while I made sure that everything was settled, and slid a nice new green and peach twenty into the machine.

But despite my claimed intentions, my game was on. Karma was in place. Yin and yang were balanced. Whatever. I outplayed, outbluffed, and outpsyched that stupid droid. Kicked its transistors back to the reservation. In the end it gave me a little slip of paper that the cashier redeemed for thirty five dollars and change.

I was happy, and then on the rest of the drive home had the joy of pondering the irony of going to the rez on Thanksgiving to take a dump and ending up exchanging a crisp and shiny twenty dollars for thirty five old wrinkled ones.