My Pets and I Spend Thanksgiving Weekend Together, 2020

dedication:

To my wonderful girls, Sundance and Buttercup, who both died in 2022 and whom we miss enormously… and to all our spectacularly unique and fantastic furry loved ones.

 

Normally I took my dogs to my sister’s house on the Cape for Thanksgiving, and they’d spend the weekend running the beaches in a snarling pack with her mutts and dozing lazily on her long sofas in her very warm house while we played games and watched movies. They’d eat turkey scraps for days. In 2020 we weren’t invited because it was Covid times; since March of that year, my one living sister had been convinced that I was a vector for disease, despite the fact that I lived alone, worked remotely, didn’t shop at stores, and only saw friends outside at a distance and usually with masks on. Oh, and she was pretty sure she’d had Covid already, but never mind that.

 

Anyway, the pets and I were on our own in 2020, although we had to tolerate bizarre phone calls from the Cape crew which involved statements like, “wish we could be together,” “thought we could quarantine for two weeks ahead but then thought nah,” and “wish you could visit.”

 

I don’t know about you, but I don’t feel bad about being single except when noxious, annoying, cloying, pitying, and ultimately self-serving missives of “caring” come my way. That is when my crew of pets lets me know that I am truly not alone. They are my chosen family for now.

 

We kicked off the holiday with a bang. On Wednesday morning, I was pleased I had cleaned the apartment the night before to prepare for pie-baking after work and had scheduled really useful meetings for the morning. Fortunately, the dogs were amazingly quiet. The usual routine of loud self-licking and mild growling at the computer during Zoom calls was not happening. Nor were the cats yowling about past grievances incurred over their fifteen years of life. Little did I know that as I worked diligently from my home office, my cat Butch Cassidy was binge-eating his dry cat food and puking it out on the clean, pink rose-festooned tablecloth, while his brother, dog Inigo Montoya, diligently ripped open the filled trash bag below him, ate some potentially dangerous items, and strewed its contents all over the freshly cleaned kitchen floor.

 

“What are you doing?” I asked them when I hung up.

 

“What are YOU doing?” They glared back at me. “Tomorrow is THANKSGIVING,” Inigo said.

 

“You’re supposed to blow off work today,” Butch added.

 

I ignored them, cleaned up, and kept working into the evening, pausing only for a walk and then a phone call with the sister, which was actually a nice one—go figure.

 

By Thursday morning, I had made the desserts: a pumpkin pie, an apple cranberry pie, and a lemon almond cake. The dogs wanted the marinating chicken. “Raw is fine,” said Buttercup, poking her nose directly into the bag in the fridge. “I like it better that way, anyway,” she added. “You overcook things.” Her brother Inigo began sniffing the garbage again. Butch asked to go outside by meowing plaintively at the door. He wanted to go convince passersby that he was homeless and starving again, despite weighing nearly twenty pounds.

 

The dogs and I went on a nice hike with some friends who looked pityingly at us because they have two children, two cars, two life insurance policies, and only one idea of a good life. When I pulled over to take a picture of a glorious sunset, they stopped their minivan on the side of the road too. “ARE YOU OK?” they asked, probably because Duchess Meghan recommended asking that recently. (Oh wait, she’s not a duchess anymore, right?)

 

 

“She always does this shit!” yelled Buttercup, poking her snout out the window.

 

“Par for the course!” belted Inigo.

 

The minivan humans waved pityingly at me, and the dogs snorted back at them. Then we drove off parallel to the sunset in the hair- and mud-ridden car that we’d also taken across the country together.

 

“Boring,” said Buttercup because she likes to talk about people who talk about us.

 

“Too many mortgages and insurance policies,” said Inigo.

 

I reflected with gratitude that since I’d passed the “FORTY YEARS OLD” landmark during the pandemic, these people and others had stopped asking about my dating life or otherwise trying to fill out tickets for me to enter the grand carnival land of “married with children.” It was such a relief to not field such well-intentioned, prescriptive expectations.

 

When back home, I began cooking the food. “Now you’re talking,” said Inigo.

 

“Shhhh,” said Buttercup. “Pretend you’re not here,” she whispered to him. “Hide under the table and she’ll leave something out on the counter.”

 

My elderly but spry upstairs neighbor came to the back porch for our safely distanced, outdoor-French-café-style meal (or rather, a long, meandering and satisfying three-hour conversation and consumption of food with a fellow anti-capitalist). The dogs immediately saw his plate as fair game and attempted to eat off it. I told them not to. “Either you put out or he does,” said Buttercup, approaching my plate territorially. I put out, but that didn’t stop them from attempting to access his plate with the guerrilla warfare tactic of sneaking behind his chair and attempting to nab his food from the underside. I put them inside.

 

Ten minutes later, I went back in for something and found that Inigo had discovered a way to maneuver his agile tongue up and across the table to lick out the entire filling of the pumpkin pie that was on it. I was very glad I had ignored all requirements for good hosting and already eaten a slice the night before.

 

“It was a good pie,” he observed approvingly. “All of it was good, well almost all of it, except the crust.”

 

I reasoned that the pumpkin could help expand his intestine to clear out any sharp or dangerous objects nesting there since the trash-eating of the previous day and didn’t chastise him.

 

“So, any dating these days?” asked my neighbor, and then added before waiting for an answer, “Well, you’re forty, that’s rough.”

 

The dogs ate their fill of the real meal once the anti-capitalist neighbor went back upstairs, declared it wonderful, and said they would be happy to eat all of it that night. Buttercup proclaimed that the marinated and cooked chicken utterly delighted her and my cooking skills were supreme. Sundance, the sister cat of Butch Cassidy, scowled as usual as she gluttonously chowed down chunk after chunk of white and dark meat. “I like it salty,” she muttered. “You finally made it salty enough,” she spewed through bites.

 

On Friday, we took a hike with a friend and her dog. Inigo and Buttercup got lost in the woods because this friend allows her dog to go wherever she wants and my dogs always tell me that since that dog can, they can too, which ends up being true. After ten minutes of no sign of them, Inigo came bounding out of the tundra of Western Massachusetts half-covered in something black and smelly. (Let’s call it poop-mud.)  “Isn’t it great, mom?” he yelled, grinning as he tore by me. “I LOVE IT!!” We were walking by a river. I lured him onto a rock and pushed him into the frigid water. “You hate me,” he muttered sullenly as we walked with him sopping wet and moping back to the car. “Only sometimes,” I told him. I canceled plans to have a couple to the yard for distant socializing. It was a good day to nap.

 

On Saturday, I met an old friend for a bike ride. I was a bit jealous of the fact that she was back home visiting with her family for the holidays until she extended our bike ride into its third hour and explained that her parents kept trying to douse her with holy water because she was unmarried and forty-three years old. I pointed out the very long tracts of bike trail available, and we separated.

 

Then the dogs and I took another hike with a couple who were imminently expecting a baby. We were discussing their hopes and fears. Buttercup, growing bored with the conversation, decided to find one of her signature souvenirs: a tree trunk that she carried horizontally. It stretched out at least three feet on either side of her. As per usual, she picked it up while behind us and then marched resolutely between all of us, hitting the backs of our knees, including those of the pregnant woman. “Six feet, six feet,” she yelled, just to be annoying.

 

 

Once ahead of us, she dropped it until we passed her and then started the process over again. “Shut up, shut up, shut up,” she murmured every time she passed us and hit us with her stick. I apologized to the pregnant people, but it didn’t really help.

 

“Oh wow!” said a passerby. “He’s so strong, isn’t he?” they exclaimed.

 

“She is,” I said. “Watch out,” I added as Buttercup cut a wide berth around them. “She thinks your dog wants her stick,” I warned as Buttercup growled loudly, “FUCK YOU, you motherfucking fleabag, dumb-as-shit weak….“

 

“She’s SO sweet,” the owners of the other dog exclaimed.

 

“Don’t get too close!” I smiled, nervously shielding them from Buttercup’s growing ire—“YA PURE-BRED CRAP FULL OF….“ She trotted off happily once they left, taking care to bang the pregnant woman’s shins on her way, just as the husband discussed benefits of masking during labor. “Shutupshutupshutup,” muttered Buttercup in time with her trotting.

 

We came home and found Butch Cassidy had amassed a large crowd of masked and concerned visitors in the driveway who were petting him and considering adopting him. “No food!” he was yelling as we pulled in the driveway. “NO water, NO hugs, NO kisses, NOTHING, I get NOTHING here.” When he saw us, he ran into the yard.

 

After eating another delicious dinner of leftovers, except for the pie crust from the pumpkin pie which Inigo said really wasn’t on par with the filling and was burnt, Buttercup and Inigo asked to go outside to pee.

 

“Sure,” I said and opened the door to the backyard. Twenty minutes later they weren’t back. I called. Nothing. Finally, after a few more minutes, Inigo came. Still no Buttercup. That was when I knew she was doing her Jedi mind trick on the neighbor.

 

Sure enough, she had broken through the hole in the fence to launch an offensive on the guy who has dog treats in both his house and his truck, and whose yard abuts ours. Using her laser beam brown eyes, she had positioned herself with a direct line of sight through his back door into his kitchen, where she had been beaming the household relentlessly with telepathic messages.

 

“What are you doing here?” I heard him ask as he finally opened the back door. Poor dude. Never understands he’s just a mark. Thinks she loves him. “Do you want a cookie?” he asked her, caressingly.

 

“YES motherfucker!” she declared, but which he heard as “if you don’t mind, kind sir.” He gave her six. “Where’s your brother?” he asked. “I told him to get mom, HAHA,” she said. “Oh well, you get his cookie,” the neighbor said. “Damn right I do!” she answered, which he heard as, “thank you dear kind gentleman, I will see to it that he comes next time.” She paraded back into our yard, dancing triumphantly as she usually does after she steals fluffy toys, food, or sticks from small children.

 

At this point in the weekend, my human family and I are usually playing games and watching movies or going to the movies and splayed out together on couches joking, but my pet family and I curled up in bed together and did crossword puzzles long-distance with a friend. It was all great, except when the human family kept calling to ask how my Thanksgiving was.

 

We had had the requisite Zoom call. We had talked the night before. We had even texted. What else was there to say? “Screw them,” said Buttercup.

 

“Yeah,” said Inigo.

 

“We are the ones who stick by you, no matter what,” Buttercup added, rolling over in bed next to me and making sure to get some backyard dirt onto all the sheets.

 

“We don’t care if you’re a vector for disease,” said Inigo.

 

“Aren’t we all?” asked Butch sagely. He is the one who brings home ear mites every summer.

 

“Yes,” said Inigo, kindly lending me one of the deer ticks he had picked up that day.

 

“Remember when I gave you all sarcoptic mange?” asked Buttercup, grinning up at me.

 

“After you rolled in that dead animal on the beach, and then I had to spend hundreds of dollars at three different vets before diagnosing you myself from a blog on the Internet?” I clarified.

 

“YUP!” she cried, waving her tail enthusiastically. Sarcoptic mange was the best transmissible disease we had shared recently. She won the story-telling contest, and we all went to sleep.

 

On Sunday, Butch decided to complain about the way in which we all enter and leave the apartment. He went out the back door and then positioned himself at the kitchen window and began scratching the screen. When I went to investigate, he stared at me. “I want to come in this way,” he said.

 

“No,” I said. “The potted plants are in the way and it’s a window,” I explained.

 

“SCREW YOU,” he said. “doors are for losers. I want to come in THIS WAY.” He scratched some more and then sidled off to find passersby who might adopt him.

 

I made food and listened to a podcast about food pantries and contemplated how horribly unfair it was that I had a house full of food during this time and thought about how much more I could do to try to help. We took a walk again.

 

Buttercup now found a short, fat log so wide that she had trouble getting it out of her mouth once she got it in. “Isn’t he determined?” said the man who jogged past us.

 

“Chauvinist pig,” Buttercup muttered.

 

“Yup!” I said cheerily.

 

When we got home, more masked people were in the driveway petting and considering adopting Butch. “Soooo hungry,” he was wailing, “never feeds me, only chicken on Thanksgiving, not even any turkey.” He ran to the yard when we pulled up, and the people, having written down our address for reports to Animal Services, backed away.

 

We went inside and I cooked some more food while listening to a podcast about all the people who stole land from the Native Americans or moved in after land was stolen and used their white privilege to gain territory. Aha. I now saw I was one of them, a part of the great story of shmuckery. Living on stolen land, the descendant of white-ish immigrants who moved in after, and bought it, and thought it was theirs to buy. What a shmuck I am, I concluded as I served the dogs some cooked chickpeas, squash, cauliflower, and yogurt, because it was a good night to go vegetarian. They ate enthusiastically, ran out to pee, actually peed, and came back in.

 

They looked at me and indicated I should come down to their level. I sat on the kitchen floor. “It’s hard to be a human,” Buttercup observed, eyeing me. “You think too much,” she added, burying her head in my stomach.

 

“Thanks for dinner,” said Inigo, sticking his head under my hand. “I liked all those vegetables.” They looked at me with their big brown eyes and didn’t attempt Jedi mind tricks.

 

“It was a fun weekend,” said Inigo.

 

“I WANT TO GO OUTSIDE,” interrupted Sundance. “LET ME OUTSIDE NOW!!” she screamed.

 

“You never go out at night,” I murmured as I rose and approached the door. I opened it.    “WHO SAID YOU’RE THE BOSS OF ME?!” she yelled and tore off into the night.

 

I settled back down on the floor with the dogs. We kept staring into each other’s eyes. “More food?” Inigo asked. “More food?” Buttercup asked.

 

“LET ME IN THE HOUSE NOW!!” screamed Sundance, leaping up to throw her entire body at the back door and claw at the window maniacally. “THIS WEATHER IS GOING TO KILL ME. WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU?!”

 

We all went to bed and started doing more crossword puzzles.