I can’t say for certain when we all actually first noticed it, but I’m pretty sure it was around the time we’d all really gotten into eating our side dishes.
At least, that’s when I noticed it. I remember reaching for the salt, and stopped with my hand mid-air. The salt was forgotten the moment I realized that my best friend’s cousin (we’ll call her BFC) was feeding teeny bits of her Thanksgiving dinner to a tiny, furry face in her cleavage.
I’m just going to let that sink in for a minute. Don’t feel weird if you have to read that paragraph more than once, either, because it’s a really hard idea to wrap a reasonable mind around. So I did what any normal person would do, and kicked my husband in the shin so that he, too, could stare at BFC’s boobs. I think it’s when he coughed to keep from choking on his roll that everyone really started to notice that BFC was feeding her cleavage.
After thirty years, my best friend and I no longer need to speak to have conversations, which I had considered a blessing until that moment. It turned out that it is also a curse, because the spectacular mix of amazement and disgust on her face was clearly asking me if she was truly looking at a freaking fuzzy-faced rodent eating turkey from her cousin’s tit-trough. And I have to tell you, I don’t think I’ve ever worked as hard as I had to work to keep from laughing so hard that I fell out of my chair.
So anyway, aghast and silent, we all watched as BFC give tiny pinches of food to this fuzzy little face. Somehow we managed to finish eating. In what I can only assume was an attempt to break the silence, my friend’s mother in law prompted this exchange:
MIL: “So what’s in your shirt, dear?”
BFC: “It’s my sugar glider.”
MIL: “Oh. I see. Does it fly?”
It was at that point the conversation stopped, because as it turns out, they glide.
Especially if they’re thrown.
When this one was thrown, it landed on the leg of my pants. And although that wasn’t my favorite thing, its landing zone happened to be about two and a half inches higher than my three year old’s head.
When I stripped it off my slacks and held it up (I’ll be honest, I wasn’t sure what I was going to do when I held it up, but it probably wasn’t going to be Thanksgiving Day-appropriate), it peed in my hand. It PEED.
In my HAND.
Her boob-rodent had peed over my kid’s head through my HAND.
It wasn’t long after that BFC was invited to enjoy the remainder of her Thanksgiving holiday…well, anywhere other than around us. Oh, and did I mention that this was my husband’s R&R from Afghanistan? No, I didn’t. And do you want to know why? Because we still, to this day, refer to that as the sugar glider Thanksgiving, rather than the R&R Thanksgiving.
And I will never stop being thankful for that.
