My mom hosts, on average, about 35 people a year for Thanksgiving. Nine kids, plus spouses, plus 22 or so grandkids - it is a lot of people. Each family brings a dish of some sort, but my mom does the cooking of the turkey and the stuffing.

About 10 years ago she started to cook more than one bird for the dinner. Since the larger turkey took up all the space in her main oven she bought a medium-sized rotisserie oven to cook a smaller, second turkey.

A few years ago the rotisserie oven broke. A couple of weeks prior to Thanksgiving my mom was giving the (now old) rotisserie oven a test run to make sure it was ready. Well, she found out that the mechanism that turned the fowl was not working properly. She asked my dad to take a look at it to see if he could fix it. She did not want to have to spend the money to buy a new oven. She left the oven on a table in the laundry room/back office so my dad could tinker with it.

My dad traveled a bit with his job but he would go in and out of his office almost every day. Every night for three weeks my mom would ask my dad if he fixed the rotisserie. Every night my dad would say he did not get around to it. My mom explained that rotisseries were expensive and if she had to, she would get a new one. My dad would then tell her that he would fix it and not to waste the time or money.

The rotisserie just sat on the table.

The Tuesday before Thanksgiving my dad came home early from work and saw the rotisserie sitting on the table. With only 48 hours left until Thanksgiving, he grabbed a screwdriver and decided to take the oven apart. Later that evening, when my mom and dad were talking, he told her that he disassembled the oven but could not see anything wrong with it. He also told her that the he was having a hard time putting the pieces back together. My mom freaked out.

The day prior, that Monday, my mom went out and bought a new rotisserie oven and threw the old one away.

My dad took apart a brand-new oven.