You know those round tins of fancy butter cookies that every grandmother in America is required to have in her house at all times? Well my boss just came back from lunch with one of them and announced that she brought cookies for the office. Yay, cookies! But it turns out she had ulterior motives.
It seems her daughter's pet gerbil, Tom Brady, died last night and she needed something to bury him in. So she bought a tin of cookies and told us it needs to be empty by the time she leaves for the day. So we're eating out of a casket. Great, thanks for that.
Sadly, Brianna's own pet gerbil Nibbles also recently passed on. She too got a tin box send-off, although hers was an empty one we found in our garage as opposed to someone saying, "Hey, finish off these cookies, I've got a dead animal to stick in here!"
Over the years, my parents' backyard has become the final resting place of many a beloved pet. Scattered around the edge of the property line in shallow, unmarked graves are half a dozen guinea pigs, two gerbils, two parakeets and a cockatiel. Tin boxes became the tomb of choice after wild animals dug up and ate the remains of pets buried in cardboard boxes. Even the stray cat we found laying lifeless by my grandmother's shed one day was dug up and eaten the night we buried it. The next day, all that was left was a hole in the ground and a few swatches of fur.
I don't know what's out in those woods that's eating these things; wild cats, coyotes, scrunts...but whatever they are, my grandmother used to go out to the edge of the woods with plastic microwave dinner trays filled with anything from steak to salmon to manicotti for them to eat. Just like Betty White in Lake Placid. Just to make sure you understand this now, a little old lady shuffles out into the woods at dusk to feed whatever dug up and devoured an entire cat.
Speaking of my grandmother, she's now living at a rehab center just a few minutes away from the house. She's doing okay, but she keeps asking for her girdle. At least she's not out in the woods feeding salisbury steak to wolverines.
