All the best stories have titles. All the worst holidays end up with titles. When I get together with my family for a holiday, I am always hoping not to end up with one that we'll have given a title to a few years down the road. For example: "The Thanksgiving Denzel Brought Home an Armload of Guns." There have been a handful of times in my life when I've been really afraid, and this time had to be somewhere in the top five at least.

Denzel (not his real name, but it's equally ridiculous) was my mother's husband from the time I was about 17 until I was 31 or so. He was one of those really awful controlling alcoholic violent people that are just not a hell of a lot of fun to be around.

James Ruppert was this guy who murdered 11 of his family members on Easter Sunday in 1975 in Hamilton, Ohio. This may seem irrelevent, but it isn't.

During my mom's marriage to Denzel, every time we went to her house for a holiday dinner, events would follow pretty much the same pattern: Denzel would head for the bar and start drinking, my mother and my sisters and I would have dinner and enjoy one another's company, then Denzel would come home drunk and start some obnoxious huge fight with my mother that sometimes ended in violence. I had started to worry that one of these days, he was going to come home drunk and just shoot us all, a la James Ruppert. Every holiday that went by, I was more convinced that we were all goners. I started to refer to our eventual murders as Denzel 'pulling a Ruppert'.

So on this one Thanksgiving when I was in my very early twenties, we'd followed the usual pattern. Denzel had gone to get drunk, we'd had dinner, and I was sitting around afterwards feeling nervous and uneasy. We heard a car pull into the driveway and my sister went to look out. My mother asked, "who is it?" and my sister replied, without the slightest trace of alarm, "It's Denzel and he's carrying a bunch of guns." I was immediately on my feet and on the way out the sliding glass back door until I realized that no one else was running. So I stopped. And Denzel came in with his guns, went to his room, and didn't come out for the rest of the evening while we carried on visiting with each other.

So I guess what I learned was that my intuition wasn't all that great, because I sincerely thought we were all going to be shot, and it turned out to be the most peaceful holiday we'd had in years. And I also learned that even I didn't trust my own intuition. I stopped moving out the door when I realized no one else was coming, despite my entire being telling me to run. If he'd come out shooting, I would have ended up dead from the peer pressure to not run away. That would've pissed me right off too.