Every weekend I turn on the TV in search of professional football, and I’m always relieved to find the Dallas Cowboys on. Even though the Cowboys aren’t based anywhere close to me geographically and have only the most peripheral of connections to us folks in New England, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t get to see them each and every weekend. Thankfully, I can sleep at night knowing that one of the very few games I will see on Sunday or Monday will feature those lovable Secessionistas, despite the extremely low odds that they will make the playoffs. (I also love seeing Jerry Jones all the time. He seems like a great guy! I wish they’d do more one-on-one interviews with him.)

Seeing Tony Romo on TV every weekend also reminds me that my Dad felt very connected to the Dallas Cowboys. He loved Roger Staubach, not just for his football playing capacities and the fact that he forewent his prime years in the game in order to serve in the US Navy, but also because he apparently attended mass regularly.

But back to the Cowboys: they currently hold a record of six and six and thereby are mathematically still capable of making the playoffs. If they do somehow make the playoffs, we’ll get to see them on TV one more time (losing to some weak-ass NFC outfit). This just adds to their appeal and my delight in finding them on my television practically 24/7.

I know this isn’t really possible, but because I hold “America’s Team,” as the Cowboys are called, in such high esteem, I grasp onto faint hope that some magical week may appear in the NFL Calendar which has the Cowboys playing all three nationally-televised night games: Sunday, then Monday, then Thursday.

( I know, I know: “Dream On!”)

Once a year or so, I take my kids to a park to run them around under the guise of showing them how much fun it is to fly a kite. I also take them fishing once a year, expecting the march to the fishin’ hole to extract a certain number of the day’s footsteps from their under-exercised frames. The difference is, when I take them fishing they ultimately catch fish, whereas when I take them kite flying they do not catch fish. Unfortunately, neither do they end up flying kites.

We have a large park in our neighborhood, with tennis courts, basketball courts, 3 ball fields, and lots of nooks and crannies for teens to brood in while drinking their peculiar mixture of highly caffeinated energy drinks, low-end vodka, and embalming fluid. In our quasi-urban environment, it’s about as good as kite flying territory gets. I took the kids to this park recently in near hurricane conditions in a vain, final attempt to get their kites into the air long enough for them to experience boredom and never again ask to fly a kite. However, despite the high winds, the three (admittedly cheap) kites we brought refused to rise to the occasion. I’ve come to the conclusion that the problem is the park’s lowland geography relative to the land surrounding it. This must cause some sort of natural downdraft such that every time we manage to catch a little air, another gust sends our devices crashing to the ground.

The good news is that the kids don’t seem to mind too much, at first at least. They run back and forth with these flightless kites bouncing along, upside down, on the ground behind themselves. Eventually, boredom is achieved, though not for the reasons I had hoped.

I didn’t grow up a pie lover. Offered the choice between pie for dessert and no dessert at all, I’d usually opt for the latter. Who are these strange people who long for pie, I’d wonder. Have they been deposited here by aliens who actually like fruit in their desserts? Have they never experienced a gooey brownie?

The pies of my youth were especially unappealing. No one offered me blueberry pie, or cherry pie, both of which looked awesome in Family Circle pictures but apparently couldn’t be had in upstate New York. Instead, we got Quebecois meat pie, which might have been good but was for dinner, not dessert, or, cruelest of all, mincemeat pie, a concoction of all the things kids feel, at best, tepid about. Raisins? Figs? Ginger? Suet?  For dessert?! Sorry, I have homework to do.

My grandmother also made something called “tarte au sucre,” or sugar pie, which is, basically, a strong-tasting brown sugar bomb in a shell. In Canada, it was either that or a dry biscuit that was probably OK with coffee, but wasn’t particularly good otherwise. I’d eat sugar pie, though, because it didn’t contain any fruit.

Lately, I’ve emerged from those dark, pieless days thanks to my son, who has demonstrated, via near-daily consumption, the wonders of warm pie with ice cream. Apple pie, strawberry-rhubarb pie, or blueberry pie, heated in the microwave until oozing and steamy, with a big scoop of vanilla ice cream on top, is now, in my opinion, a tier-one dessert. This means it ranks up there with chocolate chunk cookies, Texas cake, and my mother’s best (though not original) concoction: caramel brownies.

I can make my way around a kitchen passably when there are mouths to feed, but I’m no chef and readily admit to lacking certain basic competences that French Canadian farmers of my grandmother’s generation would have acquired by the time they turned 13. I excel at pizzas and one-pot meals because they don’t require me to time several different dishes and get them onto plates before my guests have either drunk too much to care about comradely tact, or have already fallen asleep (or both). Roasting a large, dry bird is, relatively speaking, more complicated.

Despite this, I have been put in charge of Thanksgiving dinner once again, a job that I both relish for its challenge, and dread for its high odds of failure. I undergo vigorous mental preparation upon learning that I’m to be the Thanksgiving cook, reflecting upon the highs and lows of my several past efforts, and calling on my Irish Coast Guard training, which advocates keeping the liquor cabinet stocked in case one screws up the most important meal of the year.

Meat thermometers have failed me over the years, so this time I went out and purchased one that cost nearly $30 and has a remote alarm feature that can travel with me up to 200 feet from the roasting bird. If I’m 200 feet from the turkey, I’m in someone else’s house, so I’m not likely to need this feature, but buying it seemed better than doing what I’ve done in the past – sticking several different thermometers into the bird such that it looks like an acupuncturist’s practice cadaver.

Ironically, this year’s Thanksgiving battle is occurring in the middle of yet another of my occasional attacks of anosmia, and I can’t smell a damned thing. Being an anosmic cook is not quite analogous to being, say, a deaf audio engineer, but when you’re only so-so in the kitchen, it sure doesn’t help. With any luck, the disorder will correct itself by the time I need to sniff the milk before adding it to mashed potatoes. If not, I’ll give that job to my son.