I’ll start by making a few things clear:

I love my father, I love cooking and I love Thanksgiving.

And now that the throat-clearing is done, I can move on to the complaining.

Because of all dishes in all the holidays on the calendar, there’s nothing like the Thanksgiving turkey for getting under your skin.

My dad lives in Florida, where global warming has gone to retire, and he keeps the thermostat set to an Amazonian 85 degrees to boot.

As an immigrant, he fears drafts more than his parents feared the invading Italian army (which was, admittedly, not much), so every window was closed and every shade drawn. If I moved to turn on a fan — or, heaven forbid, the air conditioner — my father repaired to his room to put on every sweater he owned, layered like the Michelin Man climbing Mount Everest.

For the weeklong trip, sometimes it felt like we were vacationing and other times like we were being questioned by the CIA under suspicion of terrorism.

So, already cooking ourselves, my father and I were ready to talk turkey. My dad was once a wonderful cook, and I have memories of smoked turkeys and Cajun spice-brined birds decorating dinner tables of yore. Lately, though, due to a combination of age and ill health, he hasn’t been able to handle the turkey anymore. Thus, I have inherited the job.

In the run-up to Thanksgiving, we had conversation after conversation in which I assured him that I’d handle everything.

Imagine my surprise, then, to hear activity in the kitchen at 6 a.m. on Thanksgiving day, pots and pans being slung around with suspicious abandon, almost as if — almost, I say — he had wanted to wake me up. I emerged, as summoned, to ask my dad just what the everloving heckfire he was doing.

“I’m getting the turkey started,” he said, not having progressed to actually starting the turkey as much as he had started me to start the turkey.

“It’s too early to start the turkey,” I said, futilely.

“I don’t want to eat at 9 p.m.,” he said, sitting down victoriously in the living room to watch a Greek soap opera where the women fight with their husbands about whether the men should eat breakfast.

Pressed into service, I took the turkey out of the refrigerator and set it down with a metallic clang.

“When did you take the turkey out of the freezer?” I asked, already knowing the answer. Of course, he had moved it to the fridge two days ago. The answer is always two days ago. No one in the history of the world has ever properly defrosted a turkey before Thanksgiving.

“Just leave it on the counter,” he said, and I wished for the thousandth time that immigrants older than 65 feared food-borne illnesses as much as they did drafty air.

I put the turkey in the sink to run some cold water over it. That’s about the exact moment my dad decided to set the oven to a cleaning cycle. I didn’t know that because he told me. I knew because five inches of thick black smoke covered the ceiling like we were in the opening scenes of the movie “Backdraft.”

“Is someone burning plastic?” I choked out, tears streaming down my face.