Thanksgiving 2006

(My apologies; I have removed the previous poetic injustice due to many readers’ perception of its “poor man’s Suessical” type nature and have decided to stick to asinine recounts of life’s happenings for the time being. Regards.)

I jumped in the Blazer late last Wednesday night and set out on one final, old-fashioned, solo Texas road trip; with roughly 10 hours of driving scheduled in the forthcoming 48 (final referring to “trip for the Blazer”; I get a company car on Tuesday), and I was feeling just fine about the whole thing. I’m not much of one for rock solid agendas, but this one included a trip home, a brilliant dinner with the fam, 27 fall birthdays all celebrated at once, and a trip to Austin for a meeting of the college roommates for the first time since graduation. All I needed to get started was some traveling music and some gasoline; luckily we’ve stabilized the Middle East, meaning both of those things were readily at my disposal.

Meanwhile, my roommate Alex had planned to surprise his family by driving in to San Marcos for their Thanksgiving/Chanukah celebration later that night as well, and called me at 10:30 to see if traffic was ok. Since I was headed down Interstate 45 South to Houston and he was taking 35 to Austin…oh yeah, and it was 10:30 at night…I couldn’t compute why he would be calling to ask me that question, but like most things involving Alex, I just figured that whatever the case was, it was likely I would have to clean it up when I got home.

Four short hours later I was in League City and ready to crash. The next morning I got up and watched The DaVinci Code on my parents new 1,900” Projection Screen In-Home Theater, but unfortunately, it didn’t make the movie any better than when I watched it on my 19” at home. Talk about brushing over the story…geez. The last time Tom Hanks and Ron Howard co-operated on a quality film, Hanks kept the Earth in his window and fit a square peg into a round hole…ba-zing!

I am getting progressively worse over time, aren’t I?

Then the rest of the family showed up: Bryan and Liv; Jennifer, Ethan, Will, and Wes; Pat and Doug; Skip, Neely, Josh, and Tessa. The night was pretty standard family-time protocol; I, of course, was the lone ranger, and as usual, Jennifer called me a black sheep…soon afterwards I burned down the rec center and yelled “Kill Whitey” at a protest rally. Like I said, pretty standard stuff. After dessert and some small talk, I was on the road again, headed to Austin.

I met my college roommates Jeff and Danny, and Danny’s girlfriend Tiffany, on 6th street at around 11 o’clock and we immediately fell into step. Unlike the wallet-unfriendly taverns of the Metroplex, Maggie Mae’s on 6th had everything for $2. It was like I had died and gone to heaven…but then they decided it wasn’t my time yet so they sent me back down to a bar in Austin. Later in the night, we ran into some Ol’ Ags from college who were playing Flip-Cup in the bar. We joined in and it was a great time. Little did we know at the time just how much fortune we Aggies would see that weekend.

Jeff’s wonderful mom (and I do mean wonderful Jeff), made us an absurd spread for breakfast and then we were off to watch the Aggies. For those of you who are awful at life and did not know, the Aggies beat the despised Longhorns in Austin for the first time since the Taft Administration, and it was a sweeter high note for the weekend than in that song, “Loving you, is easy cause you’re beautiful; a-doot-en-doot-en-doot-doo….AAAAAAH”, sung by John Stamos’ older brother, Richard Stamos.

Unfortunately, after only a few short hours, the roommates all had to part ways and go back to our awesome lives of buying and selling and auditing and drawing houses.

It really was a great weekend; I even got to see some more good friends Saturday night out at Knox Street in Dallas, including Mavericks point guard Devin Harris…yeah, we go way back.

We all certainly have a lot of things to be thankful for, but something’s wrong if the good relationships we have with the people closest to us don’t top the list.