2001-11-25 - 7:39 p.m.

On the internal soundtrack: A song I played in band in 4th grade or so. Big band kinda thing. I played the clarinet (badly).

Now that I have recovered from yesterday's traumatic event, I can write another happy entry, about my Thanksgiving.

We drove up to NJ on Tuesday. It was pretty tolerable, except that Poindexter had a shrieking fit when we hit the Susquehanna toll, which was backed up at least two miles and has jumped to four dollars. "FOUR DOLLARS?!" was all I heard, repeatedly, from him for about half an hour. We've already discussed taking the train from now on, and I think this clinches it.

Wednesday was my mom's birthday. We had already celebrated with her when they were down a couple weekends ago, so mostly I just helped her get ready for Thanksgiving. Shredded a bunch of bread for stuffing, chopped some vegetables, that sort of thing. I tried to get her to go out to have her nails done with me, but she wasn't interested. I ended up having mine done between running a few errands for her.

The errand/manicure trip amused me immensely. I was picking up milk at a local dairy farm store kinda place (great milk) which is on the edges of Trenton and is in a blue-collar, lower-middle-class neighborhood. My own neighborhood, outside of my immediate development, is lower-class than my lily-white neighborhood in Arlington where we rented before buying, but this piece of Trenton was even lower-class still. I'm not saying this in a derogatory way -- in many ways I'm more comfortable with lower-class than I am with the upper-class snobs that are common to the DC area. Poindexter and I are probably somewhere in between, or we vacillate. We definitely don't fit into the neighborhoods we live in, what with our pickup and dirt bikes and heavy metal t-shirts. Anyway, it was just interesting, seeing the differences. The people-watching at the grocery store was fun.

The nail place was a hoot. The front section was full of those little nail tables, every one manned by a Vietnamese immigrant. In the back was the hair salon, manned (well, womanned) entirely by American blacks, and women were having gorgeous things done to their hair for Thanksgiving. Braids, extensions, and a special kind of crimp/curl thing. (I have always been vaguely jealous of black hair -- the way it can be braided and sculpted or even just left alone in a short afro is really fabulous.) Anyway, I felt very American in that salon. Between the people working there and the clientele, we represented a nice little cross-section of America. In a world where people are killing each other over ethnic differences, it felt damn good to be there, united for the common purpose of getting gussied up for THE American holiday.

There were a lot of little children running around. When I washed my hands midway through my manicure, I came back to find an adorable little boy getting ready to climb into my chair. "Hey, somebody stole my chair," I said, smiling. His mom pulled him out of it, and I sat down and said, "Want to share? I've got room." He looked up at me with big eyes and nodded, so I picked him up and plopped him next to me. Just then my nail guy came over with a folding chair for the kid, so I said, "Hey, look, a chair all for you!"

In retrospect I wonder if the mom was wigged out by me touching her kid. People are weird about that nowadays. But she didn't pull him out of the chair as she could have, so perhaps not.

This was the first time I'd ever had a guy do the manicure. That was a little weird. He was pretty cute, and didn't seem gay, so having him hold my hands so gently and taking each of my fingers in his hands made me feel vaguely like I was cheating on my husband.

Thanksgiving itself was an absolute riot, one of the best I can remember.

At my mom's house, people gather in the kitchen. It's not a big kitchen, but it's very warm and cosy, so people gravitate to it. And my mom's family is very loud and boisterous, always cracking jokes and singing, and Aunt Marianne and Aunt Cassie's husband, my Uncle Larry, in particular, were in fine form. Goofy semi-embarrassing photos from a family beach week ended up on the bulletin board. Several times during the evening I saw people laughing so hard they couldn't speak.

The jokes seem dopey in retrospect. You had to be there. One was centered around Aunt Kay driving her boyfriend and her son to the party. My mom made some kind of "Driving Miss Daisy" crack -- "Rather, Miss Daisy driving the guys" -- and we all sang "Bicycle Built for Two" at her when she arrived.

I had four costume changes during the evening. With all my new clothes, I didn't want to wear just one outfit. At one point they were discussing the color of one of my shirts, arguing over whether it was orange or pink, and I unbuttoned the big plaid shirt I was using as an apron, stuck my chest out a bit, and said, "It's salmon". The sound of my aunts agreeing on the color was drowned out by Uncle Larry yelling, "I've never seen fins like that before!"

Even me making the gravy -- for the first time at Thanksgiving -- was a big deal and everyone had to get involved. All my aunts, Uncle Larry, Marianne's husband, and my cousin Billy were leaning over my shoulder evaluating whether it had been browned enough, whether there was enough flour in it, etc.

Marianne and her hubby, Stacey and Brent stayed until midnight. I shared my pumpkin spice cappuccino with them, and they liked it enough to take some of the mix home. Woo!

On Friday, we stopped in to visit Alicia and Matt and the twins. Alicia is due on January 10th, and she looks the same as she always does except for what looks, quite literally, like a basketball under her shirt. The kids are impossibly adorable, as always, shrieking and laughing over a huge stuffed duck (same size as them, basically) and patting and kissing their dog.

When we left NJ, we asked my parents to accompany us to Philadelphia to see the four-story-high Christmas light show at the Wanamaker building and grab some dinner. When I was a kid, we took a day off every year just before Christmas to go to Philly and watched the light show, listened to the spectacular organ, ate, shopped at The Gallery, and wrapped it up with a stop at a living nativity on the way home. We hadn't been in years, and I wanted Poindexter to see the light show.

He says he liked it, but it was hard to tell because he spent the whole time looking sideways at my mother, who was dancing and singing along. I was, too, but perhaps not as noticeably as she was. At the end of the show, the organist played "God Bless America" as a HUGE American flag rose up to cover four stories of the Grand Court. The combination of the majestic organ and the flag was too much for me and my parents -- all three of us got quite misty and hugged and wiped our eyes. Hard-hearted Poindexter, who never cries about anything, says "it was nice".

My brother has been told, from time to time, that he resembles a famous person. First it was Cameron from "Ferris Bueller's Day Off", then it was Chandler from "Friends", and the latest is MTV's Carson Daly. He does have a faint resemblance to each of these people, but he's way better looking than any of them, and has FAR more personality and charm than the hideous Carson Daly.

Anyways, he was heading into the subway one day up in Manhattan where he lives, and two people leaned out of a car and yelled. "Hey, you're that dude!" "Yeah, from MTV, you're Carson Daly!" My brother merely smiled and said, "Yep" and kept going. He cracks me up.

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