I get invited to Thanksgiving dinners at a few different places each year, and I always say no. For several reasons, I don’t like to be around a lot of people, I don’t like the whole premise of Thanksgiving, and I’m usually working.
This year I had 5 dogs at my house and 2 sets of cats to drive around town and take care of. That’s kind of a slow holiday for me but still time consuming, I stay at each cat's house for an hour.
Well, I said Yes, to someone this year, partly because I had to drop something off at their house anyway. The day before Thanksgiving one of the grandparents got COVID, so that dinner was off.
Late Wednesday night one of my favourite clients called to invite me to their Thanksgiving or at least the dessert portion. Turns out one of the cats I was checking on is by them, so I said Yes. (It’s not like me to say yes, I am such a no kind of girl.)
I went for just the dessert portion. I went from the very eastside of Nashville to very west of Nashville, 2 towns over. It just worked out that I was heading west into the sunset, so the drive was absolutely beautiful!
My clients had a Greek dinner, vegetarian. I watched them put it all away. Two different quiches, veggie lasagna, spanakopita, and roasted sweet potato chunks, are what I saw as I talked to the other people there.
Then dessert came out, a honey walnut cake, apple pie, pumpkin pie, an amazing no egg chocolate cake and 3 kinds of cheesecake. My goal was to try some of each, but I didn’t even get through 3.
There was no political conversation that I heard. Three of the women had breast cancer so talked about that, one person was a schoolteacher, so we talked about that, and we talked cars.
Lots of talk about dogs, there always is when people find out I’m a dog trainer. “Why does my dog do this?” “Why does my dog do that?” My client has 3 dogs, only one that I have trained.
In the midst of heavy questioning about dog behaviour one of the guests' sons (like a 30 something son) gets up and starts rinsing dishes. My client (the host) is fussing at him and telling him to stop, I’m trying to make sure I get enough graham cracker crust on my cheesecake and am distracted when the host asks me “Tracy, why does he do that?”
I look up and see the guy still rinsing dishes and say, “I’m guessing his mom taught him proper manners.” There was silence in the room for a minute and then everyone cracked up laughing. Seems she was asking me something about one of the dogs. I laughed too and told her to make an appointment.
How was your Thanksgiving?