Darin and I had a 6:30a.m. flight out of San Francisco International to Chicago. You have to be there at least an hour before take-off, of course. And SFO is about an hour from our house.
This was not one of my better scheduling coups.
The airport shuttle showed up at 4 a.m. Since we'd had some people over at our house until 10 p.m. or so and we hadn't yet packed, Darin and I decided that we'd just stay up. We've done that before...strangely, on another occasion when I scheduled a 6 a.m. flight out of SFO. (Experience is what you get from previous mistakes, unless your name is Diane.)
On that occasion I told Darin that I would be asleep before takeoff, and I was. I assumed the same thing would happen this time; it did. There is one good thing about leaving first thing in the morning. You wake up long enough to eat the cornflakes they give you and you sleep the rest of the time. We woke up for the plane change in Chicago and took a puddle jumper (where the puddle is Lake Michigan) to Traverse City for Thanksgiving. 9 hours from the shuttle picking us up to getting off the plane in Michigan. Whee ha.
(A couple of years ago -- I think it was when I was at a stopover on my way back from New Orleans -- I came up with the brilliant observation that a long trip of any sort, whether a plane trip or a car trip or what, has this curious effect of wiping your brain. You have your life going in place A. Then you get on a plane and somehow during transit your brain gets wiped and place A seems like a distant, foggy memory.
(You get to place B and place B is the only real place. You spend your time there and it seems like forever -- have you always lived in place B? Then you leave and your brain gets wiped again: you can barely remember place B, because you were there for what seems like only seconds and now it's only a distant, foggy memory. And you've hardly been away from place A. It's like you never left. This is why vacations don't work. We need scientists working on eliminating the brain wipe. This is also why I feel so disoriented moving between Los Angeles and San Jose -- I've always just left the last place.)
Every Thanksgiving we get together with Darin's family, because every Thanksgiving his extended family gets together. I was a little overwhelmed the first year. It seemed like there thirty million people, all of whom were extroverted and loud and talking at once. Darin was one of the quiet ones. I learned how he could be so comfortable in any situation once I saw Thanksgiving dinner in action.
On Wednesday Darin's Uncle Bob and Uncle Dan picked us up at the airport and took us to the little hotel we were going to stay at during the week. Everyone else was staying at Darin's grandparents' house or at the house of some of the grandparents' friends next door except for us. Darin's Mom, no fool she, knows how I feel about having thirty million people underfoot at all times -- I'd go wacky. The hotel is about two blocks away from the grandparents' house, so it was no big deal, and we were pretty much only going to sleep there.
We went to the hotel and slept. And slept. And slept.
We woke up at 7 p.m. and walked over to Commotion Central. Yes, it was cold. Everyone keeps making fun of me for the being a California Weather Wimp -- "They think 50 degrees is cold!" Okay, I know you can bundle up; I know houses and stores are heated. That's not what bothers me about winters. I don't like lots and lots of snow -- it's dangerous, it's a pain, and you have to shovel it constantly. And I hate the idea of flying in winter weather, because I have a fear that we're going to get the one ground crew that forgets to de-ice the wings, okay?
We had some of the chili that was on the stove and joined the festivities with Mitch, Scott, Lauren, Mark, Tracie, Jody, and Matthew (the kids), and Steve, Carole, Lil, Dan, Bob, Betty, Henry, and Ilse (the grups). I was feeling kind of icky, because I've been fighting getting a cold all week. The kids played Trivial Pursuit Genus III -- the Adler/Ostendorf clans play full frontal assault Trivial Pursuit; to play them is to fear them -- and the TV was on whatever the current owner of the clicker set it to.
I started feeling really awful and Carole drove me back to the hotel. I played Mission: Thunderbolt and watched TV for a while before settling down and going to sleep. Darin came home and started reading for a while before going to sleep.
Before Darin dropped off, however, he told me that Ilse, his grandmother, had suffered a mild stroke and had to go to the hospital. Her sister died recently from a stroke, and when Ilse was having the stroke that knowledge scared her the most.
I was very concerned about this news. Ilse is one of the neatest people I have ever met. I wish I'd gotten to know her when she was younger and more physically active -- there's nothing wrong with her mentally right now at all, but she's hampered by physical ailments. When I first met Darin's Extended Family, a month or so after we started living together (about three months after we started dating), Ilse said to me, "We're not going to let you go," which meant a lot to me, because it's very hard joining a ready-made closely-knit family. Then, at Thanksgiving that year, when Darin and I announced our engagement, she kissed me and said, "I told you we weren't going to let you go." She is so sweet.
I hate to think of anything bad happening to her. She's become like my own grandmother to me, because I never really knew my grandparents -- my mother's parents died right around the time she came to America, and I only saw my father's parents when I was little.
When Darin and I went to the hospital on Thursday to see her, she was doing fine, although she was sleepy and slurring her words a little bit. Her conversation was just fine, though, which was good to hear.