Thanksgiving – It’s a Greatness, You’re Lateness

November 15, 2016, 2:47 am
Filed under: Misc. Humor, Travel | Tags: cat, driving, family, Food, Holidays, late, Middle-Age, mouse, mousetrap, road trip, Thanksgiving

unknown Thanksgiving is a time for families to get together, eat too much, drink too much and share WAY too many opinions.

Many folks (usually what I like to call “the Middles”, aka the sandwich generation) try to juggle seeing several crooked branches of the family tree during the holidays without offending anyone. To accomplish this, we end up driving all over creation with our kids texting in the backseat, picking up our assigned foods at the grocery store on the way or juggling a pan of some sort of casserole on ourr knees.
And don’t forget to grab that extra bottle of wine because, frankly, Uncle Jack is going to start in on (fill in a political topic here), and one of the cousins already declared “this time I’m not gonna just sit back there and let him say that shit just ’cause he’s a thousand years old. It ain’t right.”

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It’s what we do.

It’s also why we’re often late (although sometimes that’s by design).

But I will never be able to top my brother’s excuse for why they were late one year. My brother’s known for being late; in fact we used to plan for it. We would tell him to get there at least an hour before we needed him. One year, he and his family were pushing two hours late for Thanksgiving dinner, and I finally called him on his cell phone to find out where the Hell he was.

“You wouldn’t believe it if I told you.”

(What follows is the best excuse ever):

We were getting ready and heard the cat meowing like crazy. So I followed the sounds into the garage, and there was Jackson (their large calico cat) with a sticky mousetrap stuck to his face…and the mouse still on it!

Jackson had seen the mouse wriggling in the trap and tried to bite it. The cat got his cheek fur stuck on the trap glue, and was running around howling, with a trap and a mouse about a half-inch from his eyeball.

We caught Jackson and tried to pull the trap off – not a good idea.

Then we tried hot water – in 30 seconds we had an extremely pissed off, wet cat and lots of scratches.

In desperation, we tried cutting the mouse free from the trap, but Jackson was struggling so hard we cut the mouse’s tail off. Blood was spurting everywhere, and the mouse was still stuck.

Finally, cold water did the trick. We got the trap of and put the mouse out of his misery.

“So,” he said, “we’re going to be a little late.”

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