Our family’s Thanksgiving tradition is to ritually avoid them.
Multiple generations of loved ones gathering under one roof? Rarely. We have more of a shrub than a family tree. Plus, we tend to shy away from forced socializing. If we had a coat of arms, it’d feature badgers swathed in poison ivy.
Football? Ha! We’re New York Jets fans! By the fourth Thursday of
November, we find more excitement in scouring the internet for video of curling
competitions.
I worked in a downtown Dallas office building in those days. My 7th floor office window, on a clear day, commanded a look of the flat, indistinctive North Texas landscape that was so broad and distant that one could almost make out where the Earth's surface made its subtle curve toward the other side of the planet. However, on most days the smog and ozone cleared only enough to reveal the lower parking levels of a nearby office building. So instead of marveling at natural wonders, a few of the IT people I shared the floor with would occasionally entertain ourselves by trying to identify which airline's planes from the multiple airports nearby were the ones rattling our windows at any given moment.
I came into the office a little earlier than normal that Tuesday morning, still a bit hung over from the previous week's annual sand, surf and suds vacation with friends, and logged into my computer. That's where I first saw the bulletin about a plane striking one of the Twin Towers.
NOTE: After my unearthing of last week's piece about the Minivan of Manliness, I remembered that I had written another piece about it in 2017 for the fish wrapper that eventually let me go this past December. This one is about Excitable being, well, excited, about inheriting my ride when he started learning to drive. More on that after the story:
My son asked if we could give one of his high school teammates a ride home, so I hit the button to slide open the passenger-side rear door to the minivan. As the two of them climbed in, Excitable told his friend with what I knew to be more of his own brand of goofy pride than sarcasm, “Dude, this here is gonna be my whip.”
Don’t look it up; I already did.
Here's a piece I wrote about the ol' girl back in 2008 for DadCentric.
Of Minivans and Men
Whrrrrrr -- CHUNK. Whrr -- CHUNK-CHUNK.
Hmmmm, I mused. The garage door track could have shaken loose from the ceiling again. Let's punch in that remote code two, neigh, three more times to be sure.
Whrrrrrr -- CHUNK. Whrr -- CHUNK-CHUNK.
Frickity-frick on a frickin' stick.
I had left the minivan tailgate open while it was inside the closed garage. Now the arm extending from the roller chain to the door was welded into the gate.
