This is a true story. On Thanksgiving Day, 1988, the door fell off of my oven. I never received a reasonable explanation from the door. I could only assume it was ticked off because I had gone to San Luis Obispo to spend the holiday with a friend, leaving the feeding and watering of my cats to my neighbor, Kent Smith. You would think the oven would have been delighted not to have been subjected to the abuse of the usual family Thanksgiving dinner with turkey and dressing and gravy. But no.

When Kent telephoned my friend's house to let me know what had happened, I thought he was kidding...a habit for which he was well-known.

"All right, Kent", I said indulgently, "what's the real problem? I know there must be one for you to call me here. I wasn't seriously worried, because his voice didn't sound grave enough.

"No," he said, "I really mean it. The door fell off, and it's laying on the floor, the glass broken into smithereens. I've cleaned up the broken glass as much as I can, so Bunny and Tigger (my two venerable cats) won't get into it, but I'm not sure what else you would like me to do."

I was forced to accept the fact that the door of the oven had fallen off of its own accord, thus leaving a gaping hole in my kitchen. I asked Kent to call my son and let him know, so that he or his wife could come and assess the damage and get the wheels rolling for repairs to the door.

My daughter-in-law took the door to the repair place and learned that they would have to order the double glass for the window and it would take eight weeks to get it. Ouch!

Being without an oven during the holiday season seemed like a poor plan, so I traipsed over to Cookin' Stuff and found an electric roaster oven, figuring it would come in handy for other things besides holidays. I certainly hoped so. The thing was not what you could call inexpensive!

When I went back to work after a few days vacation, I looked at my desk calendar and noted, with some uneasiness, that the project Christmas party was scheduled for my home on December 16th. "Oh, well", I thought, "I'll just ask people to go easy on things that require reheating in the oven."

What you have to understand here is that I was sort of like a den mother to an unruly gang of young people working on an R&D project at a large aerospace firm. Most of them were in their late twenties and early thirties, and like many engineering types, some of them were, well, a bit eccentric.

They were a great group of people, and they really liked having parties in my home, because it was not too far away from our workplace facility and it was an eight-room house with plenty of places for music, dancing, conversation or just plain relaxing. The parties were always pot-luck style, and after the first one, where the lack of coordinated planning was evident, I started making out a list and letting them select what they would bring.

For this party, one of the girls volunteered to make sure that the list got around, and that all the items were accounted for, with a minimum of fuss. The one thing that the oven would be essential for was the boneless turkey roll that John G., our bachelor genius, had signed up to bring.

I left work an hour early to go home and get things tidied up for the party. The rest of the crew, depending upon where they lived, were either going home to freshen up or sticking around the office for a while before coming over to the house.

By six-thirty, everyone was there except John, who lived two blocks from work. The rest of us set out the munchies, prepared our drinks and began the party. An hour or so later, we started to wonder what had happened to John. We tried calling his apartment, but there was no answer. I was mildly concerned, because I figured it would take at least a couple of hours to cook the turkey roll in the electric roaster. But I didn't let it interfere with the fun.

Finally, about eight o'clock, John arrived, large paper bag in his arms. He thrust the bag at me, and hurriedly went to open a bottle of Corona.

I took the bag to the kitchen, with a feeling that all was not well. I was so right. The turkey roll was frozen solid.

John was mystified when everyone groaned on hearing the news that dinner would be served, if we were lucky, about midnight! He assumed an air of great innocence and said nobody had told him that the turkey roll had to be thawed for several hours. That's what we got for allowing a fuzzy-logic genius to sign up for the main course.

There were a lot of cooks there that night, but John G. was definitely not one of them. And we never let him forget it!