Growing up Thanksgiving was a time to reflect on your year, hope that you’ll have an even better year in the next one, spend time with your family, eat lots of food, and watch pap-per-view professional wrestling.

While I did not grow up being close to filthy rich with a silver spoon in my mouth, I also did not grow up with my family being in the poor house either. We always had food on the table, and we were always able to have that literal silver spoon in our mouths on holidays, like Thanksgiving. All this despite the recession of the early 1990s that had left many people jobless, including my father.

Both of my sisters and I went to sexually segregated Catholic High Schools located in the forgotten borough of New York, Staten Island. Although we never lived on Staten Island, it was not hard for my eyes to see that apparently not many of the poor families of Northern Staten Island received word that there was an internet boom in the 1990s, and some of the best economic times in the history of the United States were happening at during that time.

Each year in November, my high school held an annual Turkey drive. This basically consisted of a couple of students going around to each home room class to collect canned goods and money in a drive to purchase more canned goods and Turkeys for some of the many poor families that lived in neglected and impoverished area where the high school is located. Not just any student was able to get out of sitting in homeroom for 20 unnecessary minutes to collect the money; you had to be a member of the LaSalle Youth Club, which was the basic student body group that did public and community services.

Luckily for me, each year I happened to sit in on the LaSalle Youth Club meetings. Originally it wasn’t so much that I wanted to make a difference in the community, although the idea of doing things on behalf of the well being for either an individual or community was of great appeal to me, and it still is to this day. My original reasoning for being in the weekly meetings was due to my friends happening to be left over in the meeting room from some other early morning club meeting. They never wanted to leave the room, and I of course just wanted to be social. Somehow our just hanging out in that room each week landed us on the list of actually being members of the LaSalle Youth Club.

Senior year came about, and we still did our usual thing, just ending up in the club meetings. Only this year was different. We realized that we were the older students in the club meetings. No one was volunteering to do anything. This was a sad sight. Everyone had apparently joined our bandwagon of just happening to be in the meetings and not doing anything.

So, when it came time for the Turkey Drive, my friends and I volunteered to organize it and follow through with the entire drive. It was just the four of us. None of us were ever the coolest guys in the school, and at the same time, none of us cared much about that sort of thing. We did however care about getting the 70 or so families that requested our school raise enough food for them to have a great Thanksgiving meal, and enough left over to keep them fed for a week or two afterwards.

For whatever reason in life, those people ended up on the short end of the stick when it came to the ability of being able to have the type Thanksgiving that everyone I grew up with had each year. My friends (Ponyboy, Yukon, & lets call him Mike) and I came to the decision that we would do our best to ensure that these 70 or so requests would be fulfilled by us.

For the three weeks that led up to Thanksgiving we went around to each homeroom class and collected lots of canned goods and at the end of this time span we also had several hundred dollars to purchase further items.

The Monday before that Thanksgiving we had to stay in school late to get all of the boxes in order for each family, and go to the supermarket a buy the rest of the goods. My friend Mike and I drove to the nearest supermarket with about $300 burning a hole in our pockets.

We each got a shopping wagon, and then went about looking for the items on the list that our faculty member monitor informed us we should get. We counted the prices in our heads as we went through the aisles, and then when $285 hit, we went to the checkout.

Since it was Thanksgiving time, the supermarket was packed with shoppers, Mike and I stood out like sore thumbs wearing our Catholic School white sweaters while shopping. I remember the experience making me feel like Kevin Arnold in the Wonder Years. We noticed that all of the lines were the similar in length, and that one in particular seemed more choice than the others due to a kid that was in our homeroom was the cashier. We went to that cashier - let us call him Steve.

Steve was shocked to see the both of us at his checkout line he started scanning the items. Mike and I didn’t yet have half of our items on the counter, and Steve must have scanned about 20 items when Steve asked, “Hey, is all this stuff for the Turkey Drive?” Our answer was of course a “Yes”. He then informed us that he would take care of us.

Steve then began to swing each item over the scanner at a height too high to be scanned. He did this for a large portion of our items with a huge grin on his face. When we were done at his check out we paid a bill that amounted to nearly $120, and walked away with two shopping carts full of food, cases and cases of food.

When we returned to the school, our faculty monitor asked how much we spent, and was going to give us more cash for the turkeys. When we told him our bill total, and he had looked at the quantities of food we brought into the school his face lit up, and he wondered how we got all that food for such a good deal. We told him the truth, and he informed us that we shouldn’t have done that while he had a huge smirk with a hint of a smile on his face.

Mike and I went back to the supermarket. This second trip was originally going to be a trip for us to pick up 17 (I believe) turkeys for the Turkey Drive. Only because of the fact we didn’t pay for half of the items we supposedly purchased during our first checkout we went to town on getting more non-turkey food for the drive.

Mike and I went around, stuffed our carts to the rim again, and then went back to Steve’s checkout line. Steve’s face lit up at our sight again with the thought of screwing over his boss and place of employment by giving the food away for pennies on the dollar. Steve passed one turkey that scanned and then a half dozen that did not. Mike and I informed him that the faculty monitor warned us that we were not to come back again with several hundred dollars leftover.

Steve did not see this as a problem. Instead, he scanned enough items that brought the cost up to the near capacity of the fund we were given, and then preceded to pass the rest of the items over the scanner without the items being scanned.

Mike and I thanked Steve greatly, and then we left the supermarket for school, again. Both times that Mike and I walked out of that supermarket without paying for all the items we were scared to death. We walked out filled with the guilt of allowing ourselves not to pay for everything, and then when we made it back to the school and unloaded our nerves were calmed and we knew we had gotten away with it.

Nearly ten years later, while I do feel slight guilt at having done this to that supermarket, I am proud of the fact that no family was turned down for a Thanksgiving meal due to a lack of funding and or food to go around from our Turkey Drive.

To be quite honest, we had far too much, and could not give out all of the canned goods during the Turkey Drive. We ended up sending four enormous boxes of canned goods to the NY food bank.

Happy Thanksgiving!

P.S. The statute of limiations has run out on this, and I know plenty of lawyers.