Where are many advantages to living in a house without other people, the greatest of which is not having to explain yourself.

"Why are you doing that?" someone will ask.

"Don't wear the striped tie. Wear the red tie," someone else may insist.

"If you have time to sit around watching cooking shows, why not clean out the garage?" another might suggest.

The list of entreaties is endless.

When it's only yourself and a few dogs, the situation becomes manageable. But as Ralph Waldo Emerson said, there is compensation in all things. The flip side of daily harassment is loneliness. There were days when Mr. Biddle, despite his contingent of adoring canines, was lonely for the company of other people.

Thanksgiving was approaching.

Mr. Biddle remembered one Thanksgiving Day, shortly after one of his two divorces. He spent it at Hardee's (or was it Arby's?) eating a sliced roasted turkey sandwich on a sesame bun with mayonnaise and horseradish sauce.

This year, Mr. Biddle vowed to do better.

How about a real, old-fashioned Thanksgiving dinner for the dogs of the neighborhood? he thought. I could cook turkeys and hand out invitations. Dogs are never invited to visit relatives!

Mr. Biddle went to the doors of all the townhouses where lived dogs that routinely pooped on his lawn and peed on his bushes and stirred up excessive barking from his three little brown dachshunds. Then he set to work on a menu.

If everyone shows up, he calculated, I will need two turkeys.

In his younger days, Mr. Biddle had occasionally been called upon to cook a turkey for Thanksgiving. Some of his efforts had turned out well. One, he shuddered to recall, had been a spectacular disaster, disappointing an entire houseful of hungry, unsympathetic, grudge-bearing relatives and relatives-in-law who had never forgotten.

My, how others love to pass judgment.

In any case, never in his 65 years had Mr. Biddle attempted to prepare two turkeys at once.

Mindful of the repercussions of another misstep, Mr. Biddle began planning his meal more than a week before Thanksgiving Day. He studied newspaper supermarket circulars for the best prices. He downloaded safety tips from Gobble.com. He circled the listing in his newspaper's incomplete TV guide with red Magic Marker to remind him to watch an upcoming cooking show marathon, during which all of Mr. Biddle's favorite TV chefs had promised to reveal their secrets for preparing the perfect Thanksgiving bird.

Mr. Biddle sharpened six new pencils and placed them with a college-ruled spiral theme book by the television in his kitchen.

As has previously been established, Mr. Biddle tends to be somewhat set in his ways. The cooking show marathon was scheduled to begin at 8:00 p.m., but Mr. Biddle and his little dogs—worn out from shopping for two frozen turkeys at the very best price—fell asleep on Mr. Biddle's battered leather sofas at 7:45.

When Mr. Biddle suddenly awoke at 2:00 in the morning, the Thanksgiving turkey marathon was over. All that remained on the cooking channel was a Chinese man stirring homemade duck sauce.

The next day, Mr. Biddle was further disappointed to discover that the two disposable turkey roasting pans he had purchased at Wal-Mart would not fit side-by-side in his compact apartment oven. Nor, he discovered, with fat turkeys inside, would they fit on the top and bottom racks.
Mr. Biddle pondered his plight. With neither adequate facilities nor supplies, Mr. Biddle wondered, Why did I decide to do this at all?

There was also the matter of the stuffing. One does not cook a turkey without also making stuffing. But after a few hours on the Internet, Mr. Biddle learned that the sorts of things that allegedly knowledgeable people insisted were essential for stuffing were so diverse, ranging from oysters to cranberries to walnuts to lemons to Italian sausage to apricots to gizzards to Bourbon whiskey, it made his head spin.

Mr. Biddle was overcome by anxiety, to which he responded by curling up on his battered leather sofas with his three little dogs, where they all took a nice, long nap.

Like the date set for the execution of a hardened criminal, inexorably, T-Day was approaching. Nothing, it seemed, was going to stop it. With a heavy heart, Mr. Biddle transferred his turkeys from the freezer to the refrigerator. This necessitated throwing out all the rest of Mr. Biddle's food. Costly but necessary.

With his little dogs in his battered blue Volvo staring out the driver's side window, Mr. Biddle drove to the supermarket determined to return with the following items: Bay leaves. Thyme. Onions. Shallots. Celery. Chicken stock. Carrots. Sage. Coarse black pepper. Sea salt. Pancetta. Prosciutto. Day-old French bread. Garlic. Parmesan cheese. Paprika. Flat-leaf parsley. Poultry seasoning. Red bell pepper. Portabella mushrooms. Dried cranberries. Apricot brandy. Honey Nut Cheerios. Maple-flavored pork sausage. Walnuts. Chestnuts. Worcestershire sauce. Orange zest. Allspice.

These, he was certain, could be combined to create the best turkey stuffing known to the mind of man or the palate of any dog, large or small, pedigree or mutt. Never mind that commercial turkey stuffing consists basically of well-seasoned salad croutons.

With the chef-directed stuffing, his turkeys, which through careful comparison shopping had cost him no more than $10 each, suddenly leapt to a unit cost of $40 or more.

These were, after all, Mr. Biddle rationalized, the holidays.

It appeared that if he purchased no more food before Thanksgiving, there would be enough space in the refrigerator to thaw the turkeys when the time came. The problem now was one of oven capacity.

Not having studied engineering in college frequently emerged as a handicap for Mr. Biddle. There was little that the Jacobean Poets had to say about cooking two turkeys at the same time in one small oven, although given the opportunity, doubtless they would have come up with a comment that rhymed.

Love doubled is love most dear / Abundant victuals make adoration clear.

Something like that.

Mr. Biddle considered several ideas, among them: carving the turkeys before cooking; cooking one for an hour, then switching it with the other, then back to the first, and so on until both were done, a 10-hour commitment; and cooking one turkey completely, then keeping it warm in the clothes dryer while cooking the other, also a 10-hour project.

This last idea has possibilities, Mr. Biddle reasoned. But in the end, Mr. Biddle decided to cook one turkey the day before Thanksgiving, carve it, wrap it into individual servings, and refrigerate it. The other turkey he would cook early on Thanksgiving Day.

The neighborhood dogs began arriving promptly at noon, a fine assortment of breeds and half-breeds, with some clearly potty-trained and others not, but in temperament, once they'd met face-to-face and sniff-to-sniff, wholly compatible.

Mr. Biddle's apartment soon was filled with the happy yelps and woofs of Yorkies and terriers and labs and dachshunds and Bichons and border collies and even a shy little shi tzu.

The turkeys were served on Mr. Biddle's floor and were consumed faster than an encore magic act in Branson, Mo. When the guests left, all seemed quite satisfied with the feast.

The calls began that night and continued into the next day. They weren't thank-you calls.

"Are you nuts?!" one neighbor asked.

"What were you thinking?" demanded another.

"I'm sending you the vet bill and the carpet cleaning bill!" shouted a woman.

Alas, not having been raised on the variety of succulent dishes that Mr. Biddle's little dogs enjoyed daily, the Thanksgiving guests—kibble-eaters all—had developed what one may describe as "sensitive stomachs."

Within hours of enjoying Mr. Biddle's Thanksgiving Day feast, they had begun disgorging the perfectly browned, butter-basted turkeys that earlier had seemed so delicious. His guests, every one of them, had become as sick as dogs. Mr. Biddle's neighborhood oddball rating leapt up another level.

"Well, boys," Mr. Biddle said to his three little dachshunds gathered around his scarred, knobby knees, "I guess that didn't quite work out. Maybe next year I should skip the allspice."

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