Catching Up: Thanksgiving In Indy

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday of the year.  Yeah, Christmas is nice – who doesn’t like presents?  But the feeling of a house at Thanksgiving is unique.  The smells from the kitchen, the football from the t.v., the family and friends gathered in anticipation of that second-favorite of all sensual experiences:  pigging out!  Last year was the first time we had not been the hosts, when we went up to S.F. and had the feast at Mike and Alia’s.  Felt very strange not to have OUR home be the center of this day, and we realized that a new chapter was opening in our family’s life.  Needless to say, we had a grand time in a new setting, with an expanded family and different friends.  This year was even stranger.  Our nuclear family was nuked.  Loni and I went off to Indianapolis for the holidays with my relatives, and the boys hosted a grand fest at John and Meghan’s new apartment in S.F., which we haven’t yet seen.  2,200 miles apart.  Where’s nuclear fusion when you need it?

We had an uneventful flight (thank you, SWA) and arrived to temps about 25 degrees cooler than L.A.  Not too bad, and certainly better than the week of below zero that we spent there many years ago.  Mom had homemade vegetable-beef soup ready, which was the perfect post-travel meal.  I won’t blow-by-blow the trip, but we had great meals:  the Belgian bistro-brewpub with Susy (aviso:  don’t get the sour beer) – great garlic fries and mussels;  outstanding casserole at Jack and Rose’s;  top-notch northern Italian with Wayne and Tina in the funky Broad Ripple neighborhood of the City; and, of course, the centerpiece, Thanksgiving at Susy’s.

We did not want for food!  That’s Mom’s silver head in the foreground, and great-grandson Tyler on Elaissa’s lap.  There are great-great’s out there, but not present here.  Four generations was cool enough.

We spent the rest of the week helping out at the church (yes, heathens were welcome to lend a hand), buying Mom a DVD player to match her 50” LCD, showing her how to work it and to check out movies at the library, getting her some infrared headphones to help with hearing her shows, and going to see “Blind Side” at the flics, which we all enjoyed very much, nose-high critics be damned.

Ten days is long enough for Midwest fall gloom, and the last-day drizzle didn’t tempt us to extend our stay.  We’ll be seeing Mom in about six weeks when she flees the heart of winter to come stay with us for a while. 

The flight back was interesting.  I completely forgot to go online 24 hours ahead and secure our boarding passes.  We had to get them at the airport.  It would appear that everyone now takes advantage of the online check-in.  The flight was full, and only two other people had numbers higher than ours, so we had our “choice” of four seats when we finally boarded.  We glommed onto two center seats in rows 7 and 8, across the aisle from each other.  My row had two women, who turned out to be mother (late 60’s, window) and daughter (indeterminate, aisle), with a mound of bags and garments piled on the center seat (despite, as we learned later, repeated admonishments on the speaker from the captain as the boarding progressed that it would be a full flight).  I asked them to move the stuff.  The daughter started stuffing everything under the seat in front of where I would be sitting.  Ah, no.  She finally caught a clue, and starting trying to hoist everything into an already stuffed bin overhead.  Ah, no.  The flight attendant finally hove to and distributed things into other bins.  I got to sit down (and the two other long-standing passengers finally got to pass by to find their own seats).  The ladies didn’t offer to sit next to each other.  OK, my bad for being a dope with the check-in, penance in the center seat.  Then I noticed the Book.

Both mother and daughter had retained enough junk to cover their food trays several times over.  But the daughter’s Book stood out.  Coverless.  Battered.  Five inches thick with dictionary-type indents.  As soon as we were airborne she started in on it.  I glanced.  Every single word on what looked like a thousand pages was either highlighted, underlined, or circled, sometimes with combinations of each.  Different colored inks.  Notations covered the margins, top, bottom, and sides.  What the???  Then I got it.  Heathens are slow.  It was a Bible.  Uh oh.

All right.  Just keep quiet and read your own book, self.  My fears were not realized, however.  No proselytizing.  The only irritation was that they kept talking to each other by leaning forward towards me and chatting across as if I was part of their piled goods.  But sit next to each other?  Nooooooo.  Then, the syncro splash. 

This was a smooth flight.  Nary a bump.  The drink service was effortless.  The ladies both ordered coffee, and Mom ordered a Bloody Mary for good measure at the same time.  Each pushed her debris around on the trays to make space for the drinks.  And then . . . without so much as a shudder from the plane, they simultaneously moved their arms forward and, in a synchronicity worthy of Chinese tandem diving, knocked over their drink (drinks, in Mom’s case).  Daughter took most of hers on her pantlegs.  I took about half of Mom’s mixture on my leg and she got the rest.  Napkin brigade!  The attendant kept them coming.  Mom’s tray was like a muddy-red swimming pool.  Sincere apologies in stereo.  It’s a long flight.

We start descending into Phoenix.  Mom’s gazing out the window and says that she could never live here.  I ask where they’re from (Columbus) and if they’re going on to L.A.  “Oh no.  We’re here to see Joel Osteen,” she says.  I look blank.  “Joel Osteen.”  Blanker.  “You don’t know Joel Osteen?”  Uh, nope, sorry.  “You’ve never heard of him?”  More blank, now wishing I’d kept my mouth shut.  “Why, he’s one of the biggest ministries on T.V.  He has a huge congregation.  We’ve come to Phoenix just to hear him.  I can’t believe you’ve never heard of him.”  Guess I live in a cave.  She gave me a strange, appraising look.  Probably trying to figure whether I was Jewish, Muslim, or just slow.  Clearly no right-thnking Christian person could not have heard of Joel Osteen   Thank goodness for noisy flaps and wheels lowering.  This conversation is aborted. 

Virtually the entire plane gets off in Phoenix, and Loni and I get to sit together the rest of the way to L.A.  She says she could hardly keep a straight face when the flood hit, and that her seatmate had had a hissy fit of self-righteous comments about how “those women” had just ignored the captain’s warnings of a full plane and kept their junk on the center seat.  Fun and games in the air.