Ode to Oy

At home in suburban Chicago on the Monday before Thanksgiving, I should have anticipated that the chilly morning raindrops would turn into snowflakes by noon. I should have also anticipated that the wintry precipitation would precipitate a mad rush to the local grocery store and a concurrent dip in the value of human life. A pervasive fear of melting (or possibly ruining a pricey new blow dry) turned parking into a contact sport. And the sudden threat of a potato salad famine resulted in a crowd at least three deep at the prepared foods counter. The joyous holiday season is upon us, and it's all about survival of the fittest. Let's face it, peace and love and the spirit of giving are nice ideas, but they just can't compete with good science.

With my nerves still frayed from a death defying attempt to pick up some staples on Monday, I woke to an early text from my mother on Tuesday. Again, I should have anticipated that my iphone's weather forecast for rain and above-freezing temperatures in New York on Wednesday would be so displeasing to the media that reporters everywhere (remember what I said about survival of the fittest?) would be chatting incessantly about yet another storm of the century and the prospect of thousands of American travelers not making it home for Thanksgiving. My mother was begging me to change my own flight and my daughter's flight from New Orleans so we could arrive before the apocalypse. I ignored her. Later in the day, I relented and called the airline. The nice man on the line politely put me on hold for a respectable number of minutes so he could get over his laugh attack and then came back on to tell me there were no seats available on earlier flights. I rechecked the weather forecast on my iphone; still no snowflakes. There was nothing I could do, so I went ahead with my manicure and hoped for the best.

Every year, holiday excitement is accompanied by a fair amount of holiday dread, and it seems to start earlier and earlier. This year, Walmart moved Black Friday up a week, and the pumpkins decorating the trees in the center of my town were replaced during the first week of November by strings of lights shaped into snowmen and reindeer and fake presents. All this jump on merriment simply adds to the stress -- the anxieties about travel and overcooking the turkey and the hours on end spent with family members you otherwise don't see. Or about the hours on end you won't get to spend with family members you otherwise don't see. Even in the most dysfunctional families, the only thing worse than family gatherings is no family gatherings, or family gatherings without one hundred per cent attendance.

We all go through this, every year. Lost rituals, changing dynamics, dashed expectations. Tis the season to be melancholy, yet we all look forward to it for some reason. Are we that complex, or are we just stupid. Maybe it all boils down to survival of the fittest. If we remembered, each year, what a pain in the ass the holidays are, we would stop celebrating, and then what? No more memories of freezing our butts off making sure the turkey in the deep fryer on the deck doesn't blow us all to kingdom come. No more memories of long waits on the tarmac, of pretending to eat one cousin's annual cranberry mousse despite an aversion to pink food, of gastric distress so severe your jeans don't zip again for months. No more good stories.

Then again, there's nothing wrong with a non-story. The camera crews wandered around Ohare on Wednesday morning looking bored. The arrival and departure screens were filled with rows of "on time." At LaGuardia, things were just as grim. I smiled alluringly at one cameraman, hoping he would train his lens on me instead of the decidedly uninteresting screens, but he remained optimistic that cancellations and delays would soon take over. Finally, as I waited for my daughter's flight at Newark, a reporter was bored enough to talk to me. This was my moment, and I was not about to let it pass. I told him all about my own family's version of this year's non-story. The panic. The phone calls and texts. The sleepless nights. All for nothing. My flight was not only on time but I also had an entire row to myself. The kids behind me didn't cry. Nobody near me threw up. My daughter's flight was only a few minutes late. Even the descent through the dark rain clouds felt no more death defying than a child's roller coaster ride. Yawn.

But I got my name in the paper! Okay, it was a local New Jersey rag, but my story made it in, the lead three paragraphs in an article that contained two other even less remarkable stories. And we are heading out, shortly, to celebrate our family's umpteenth Thanksgiving in Connecticut. Attendance will not be perfect -- it hasn't been for some time -- and I will miss the ones who aren't there. But I will joyfully eat way too much deep fried turkey and stuffing and sweet potatoes and mashed potatoes and brussels sprouts and macaroni and cheese and deep fried pickles and whatever other new item we add to the menu this year. And I will pretend to eat too much cranberry mousse.

And I will put my skinny jeans away for a few months, and, eventually, after the distress passes, I will look forward to next year.

Lone Sharks

By the light of my opened laptop I managed to shower, get dressed, and even put on a little makeup without mascaraing my lips or glossing my lashes. Between the time change and the power outage that had somehow managed to correct itself in all but one block of hotel rooms, darkness had descended unexpectedly early on day three of what otherwise seemed to be a perfect vacation.

I expect little snafus whenever I head to Mexico and have learned, after many visits, to turn a blind eye and just stop and smell the coffee -- even when the single espresso machine on the property is on the fritz. I have also learned to turn a deaf ear to friends' dire warnings of drug lords run amok and random shootings and mass beheadings. Not that I really pay attention, but the closest thing I've seen to violence at a touristy all inclusive on the beach is somebody slapping at a mosquito.  Anyway, it's Mexico; shit happens, and I just don't let any of it ruin my day.

Maybe I operate in darkness more often than I care to admit. Old habits die hard, and I see only what I expect to see, pretty much ignore the rest. It is only when I am out of my comfort zone that my senses become more acute and I notice my surroundings and find myself being surprised. Like when I am forty feet beneath the surface of the ocean and find myself swimming in the wake of a giant sea turtle, locking eyes with him as he glances back and waves a little flipper as if to say "follow me." Or when outsized versions of the impossibly flat fish with iridescent stripes that I barely notice in the aquarium in my dentist's waiting room criss cross in front of me as I cut through their undersea paradise with the grace of, well, a fish out of water.

Ask me, though, to tell you what colors those iridescent stripes were, or to describe the exact pattern on the turtle's shell, and I would be stumped. Ask me to describe the shark that glided toward me as I stared, paralyzed, from my perch about ten feet above, all my senses on high alert, and I would not be able to tell you much. He was gray and his triangular teeth appeared sharp; I could swear he was looking up at me, deciding whether he was in the mood for a snack. I saw nothing but garden variety shark. I wonder if he noticed anything other than chum. My senses may have been on high alert, but my powers of observation were abysmal.

On my first full day back home in American suburbia, where bad things don't happen, my senses once again kicked into high alert as somebody out of the ordinary drifted toward me. As much as I had dreaded my return to reality, I relished the comfort of my tried and true routine. Feed the dog. Get him into the car. Run into Starbucks to get my grande mild roast. Walk the dog in the eerie quiet of downtown suburbia as I sip my coffee. Same old. When the person dressed all in black, including a hood and a scarf wrapped around his face with only a narrow opening for his eyes, jogged by me I thought something was amiss. I stared directly into his eyes, even noticed that he was not wearing jogging shoes. I kept walking, even called my mom just to catch up.

When I came back around the block, I saw the person again -- or at least I thought I did. Same dark shoes and clothing, only this time the hood and scarf were off, and he stood still by a tree, staring at the array of rotting pumpkins at its base. I noticed that he was African American, certainly unusual at seven o'clock in the morning in lily white suburbia, but not out of the question. Again I stared, but he averted my gaze. I stared but all I can tell you is that he was dressed all in black and he was African American. I could not tell you the shape of his face or his height or his weight. Garden variety, like the shark. Gray, sharp triangular teeth. I wonder if he noticed anything other than suburban white chick.

I felt silly later that evening when I dialed the police hot line. They were still looking for the guy who had robbed a dry cleaner two blocks away from my Starbucks only moments before I walked my dog that morning, coffee in hand, senses on high alert only because something seemed out of the ordinary. I had read about it on line, seen the surveillance video picture of a man dressed all in black, his eyes barely visible. The police were looking for somebody with light skin. Could that be right? Was the man I saw dressed all in black but without a hood or a scarf the same man who had jogged by me. Was he the man who had stared with barely visible eyes into the surveillance camera?

How is it possible, that in the brightness of the post-time-change early sunrise, in the snafu-free streets of American suburbia where all the lights were on and I rarely had to shower or get dressed or apply makeup in the dark, with my senses on high alert because something was a bit out of the ordinary, that I could see so little. All I saw was a person who, contrary to on line news reports, was not light skinned, a person who may or may not have been the same person who jogged past me covered from head to toe, a person who may or may not have been the same person who robbed the dry cleaner.

Darkness descends, early and often.