Counting down

Howdy. In 24 hours, my wife and I will be winging our way east to Chicago for Thanksgiving with my family. I'll be back Sunday, looking forward to another holiday trip in about three weeks to Arizona for Christmas. So, wifey and I will be doing laundry, packing and re-packing clothes and necessary bathroom items and gathering all the Christmas presents for my family in a separate check-in bag. Tomorrow morning, we'll head to the airport and stand in a massive line cultivated by some lone, surly inspector who'll ask the same questions in a bored, monotone fashion: "Did you pack all your bags?" and "Are you carrying any weapons?" You feel secure about your flight in a suicidal way.

They'll be just one inspector at the metal detector and you know the guy in front of you will set the damn thing off 5-10 times in a row, causing him to remove one piece of metal at a time before going though and BEEP..he removes the belt buckle. BEEP, there goes the car keys...until the walking brain stem finally clues in to remove all the shiny bits first.

You get to the security line two hours before your flight and you barely make it onto the plane. The plane, the seats, the flight staff, the person next to you has the rarefied, dehumidified greasy airplane smell. Screaming babies go off like grenades when the plane takes off. You stare in front of you for three hours and finally taxi for 20 miles to get to the concourse, all of you anxious to get off the plane and wash the recombinant porn store/waffle house air freshener-covered-in-grease odor. Your skin is waxy and your hair crunches.

You amble down the causeway and get your bags. Your family isn't there to greet you because they don't want to pay the parking fee. They'd rather circle like sharks in the passenger pick-up zone outside. You forget what their car looks like so you are standing like a lunatic in the cold weather, completely missing their frantic waves until they are inches from your face.

Your family wonders why you aren't animated, why you aren't just bursting at the seams to see them, why you are itching your exposed skin that smells faintly of vanilla air fresheners, rotted milk and Burger King. You want to yell about the baggage roulette, staying in suspense when your bags don't appear right away on the conveyor belt. You want to tell them how it's butt-ass cold in their part of the country. You want to tell them about seven-year old behind you on the plane who kept kicking you or the family at the airport who nearly punched the ticket clerk when they learned the flight was oversold. Your mom asks you why your hair looks like that, and you give some smart-ass quip. Before you know it, you've entered a trap. You respond with too much bile and force; she says you should lighten up. All you want to do is go to their home and flay off your itching skin with a steak knife.

This is what happens when you get it into your head to move thousands of miles away from your family. All the love, affection, suspicion, neurosis, jokes, backbiting and more get compressed into a handful of days when you fly in for the holidays. You live a year in a week and can't waste any time. For as crazy as it drives you, you have to be loving and friendly. This is the only time you'll see your family all year. You take the good with the bad. You know you'll wash the airplane off of you. You know get warm inside their large house, complete with fresh bedsheets and a stocked fridge. And you know there will be chocolate chips cookies waiting for you. And milk. A large glass of milk. An oil tanker of milk for you to dunk cookies in. You'll eat things you wouldn't normally eat. Going to your family's house is no man's land of diets and exercise programs. Forget your no red meat/sugar/dairy regiment...you're eating butterscotch steak covered in butter.

And that's breakfast.

And then you all sit down for the big family Thanksgiving. You wear the least-wrinkled, nicest outfit in your battered travel bag. You all sit around the table and think about why you are so thankful. Nothing will come into your head when it's your turn; you never were much for public speaking. But before you go, as you sit at your desk trying to be clever on your blog, it'll hit you.

I'm thankful for:

• Having a job
  
• Being married to a wonderful person
  
• Being invited somewhere for Thanksgiving
  
• Having a home
  
• The plane not crashing
  
• Being loved
  
• Being given second chances nearly every day
  
• The embarrassing luxury of being overweight when other people are facing starvation, both around the block and across the globe
  
• My two cats, whom we abandoned for Thanksgiving (Bad parents, we)
  
• The time my wife arranged a surprise party for my 30th birthday, and completed fooled me
  
• Having a greenbelt in my back yard
  
• That, besides things being economically and politically crappy right now, I live in a country that's reasonably free