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    A CHAINSAW FOR THANKSGIVING

I wrote this on Thanksgiving. A lot of you read it then. It’s a good memory for me so I though I’d post it here for those who don’t follow my FaceBook. When I look back, I guess Daddy made life quite the adventure.
I am not feeling especially thankful today. I know I should, but it’s the first holiday without Daddy and I’m not feeling very grateful. So to try and change my mood I decided to share one of our Thanksgiving stories.
I was probably in middle school at the time. Thanksgiving was “Our holiday”. The entire family came to our house. We were having about 18 people for dinner. During Thanksgiving week dad saw a great deal on new kitchen cabinets. I guess no one wants to buy cabinets that close to the holiday and they were marked down so much that Daddy just couldn’t resist. My parents discussed it and the compromise was, they would get the cabinets but put them in the garage until after the holidays. I don’t know what mom was thinking. She knew Daddy just didn’t work that way.
Three days before Thanksgiving, Mom went to the grocery store for her annual huge shopping spree to get all the food we would need for the holiday. She told us she would be at the store for a while and that Daddy was in charge. The minute she left… Daddy got to work. He ordered us around, having us empty all the cabinets. All that stuff ended up on the kitchen table, the dining room table, and every chair we could find. Daddy immediately started unscrewing the cabinets from the walls.
And after about an hour, Dad knew this was taking up too much time. If Mom came home and found the kitchen like this, she would make him stop and do the job after the holidays as they had agreed and …..he would be in big big trouble. And then he had an idea. He went out to the garage and we could hear him searching around out there. Finally that came back into the kitchen with a big smile on his face and a chainsaw and his hands.
He warned us to stand back and he started up the chainsaw. He went at the cabinets like a man possessed. Not only did he cut them off the wall, he cut them into shreds. Wood was flying everywhere and big chucks of the walls had to be sacrificed too. Within half an hour, the kitchen looked very very different. The debris on the floor was almost knee deep and he was still chopping away with that chainsaw. I think it turned out to be more fun than he had anticipated.
Until Mommy got home that is. When Mom walked in the first thing she noticed was the smell of gasoline. She panicked. Anything could happen in our house and she knew it. She burst into the kitchen and was absolutely speechless. Her arms were full of groceries with another 10 bags still in the car to be unloaded. Every inch of the tables and chairs were covered with house stuff, pieces of cabinetry were everywhere and the air was full of chainsaw exhaust. Daddy look up and smiled. She looked around the kitchen and with the calmness of complete disbelief.
And somehow, on some level, I think Daddy was disappointed that she was not kind of impressed with all the progress he had made in a short time. I thought mom’s head was going to just explode.

Daddy was a Son-of-a- bitch-Nazi -Bastard for a very very long time after that day. But In the end,,somehow, someway he pulled it off. He got the new cabinets in, we put everything back and we had a normal Thanksgiving. Mom still has those cabinets. God only knows what the walls look like underneath but it made for Thanksgiving we would never forget.

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