i give thanks i can't eat any more.
A partial list:
- turkey
- stuffing with pine nuts
- oyster stuffing
- squash
- green beans
- mashed potatoes
- about 14 other plates that got passed around
- pumpkin pie with pecans
- apple pie
And about 450 people. It's amazing, given the Adler/Ostendorf "plague of locusts" method of feeding, there were leftovers.
I didn't see Darin's grandmother Ilse on Tuesday night, as you might imagine (since I pretty much stayed horizontal in the hotel room). We heard early Wednesday that Ilse had fallen down and injured her hip, so she had to go into the hospital. Steve mentioned that this is something of a Thanksgiving tradition--a few years ago, Ilse had a stroke on Thanksgiving.
On Thursday we went over to the hospital to see Ilse, who was very glad to see us. It's always difficult to visit someone in the hospital--they're scary places. Full of weird quiet punctuated by strangers dashing in and out of this hospital room and that one. Or the sounds of TVs suddenly coming on full-blast down the hall. The smells of disinfectant and medication and other, ickier scents you don't want to name.
And the people you're visiting are sick. This makes for an uncomfortable situation, at least for me, who's ill-at-ease at the best of times. Dealing with a sick relative is difficult; dealing with your spouse's sick relative ten times moreso. Even with Darin's relatives, with whom I don't in general mind spending time. (There is the problem of how I can't stand being around masses of people for long segments of time, but that is orthogonal to this issue.)
Ilse has always been very affectionate toward me and was glad to see me and Darin. She's looking forward to the baby, I can tell--she's had to wait 8 years and probably as far as she's concerned that's enough shilly-shallying around.
We didn't stay terribly long--I got light-headed just from standing up too long, which hadn't happened to me before but is evidently common in pregnancy, and Ilse choked on some of her Thanksgiving turkey and had to be seen by a nurse. We said we'd see her again before flying home, as she wasn't expected to be moved back to her retirement home before Saturday. Of course, it turned out that she didn't know that; the doctor had told Darin's parents but not Ilse herself, which we all thought was excessively bad manners on his part.
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Copyright 1999 Diane Patterson
Send comments and questions to diane@spies.com