A whole new appreciation for the holidays

Historically, I’ve never been much of a Thanksgiving person. I think this is because as a child Thanksgiving is one of the most frustrating holidays of the year. You get two days off school, but instead of being able to go outside and play with your friends you get bundled into a car and driven miles and miles away to sit down for dinner with a bunch of extended family that you’d be seeing in a month anyway for Christmas. And on top of that – no presents or candy or anything. These days I don’t mind it so much, having grown to appreciate spending quality time with family more than I did when I took them for granted. But there’s something about being the only member of my family in Chicago that results in me being invited to multiple thanksgiving dinners given by friends. I end up being the token non-family member at these events, so I usually feel a little weird about it.

This last weekend I was not able to do dinner with family because I was working on Friday and Saturday. So I reluctantly accepted an invite to dinner with my friend B.Da who happens to be the person who introduced me to the GF. She specifically requested that I bring my homemade chocolate truffles which I usually make for the holidays. They are really good, but they take 3-4 hours to make and I didn’t have any ingredients. So on Wednesday after work I pulled into the Jewel on the way home to pick some up. That’s right – I entered a grocery store on the night before Thanksgiving. Oh…the horror…

Typically, I save a bunch of time at grocery stores by using the self-checkout option. In my experience, most people are afraid of doing the self-checkout because it involves computers and bar codes and most people are not smart enough to figure it out on their own. So I’m usually able to slide right through in a few minutes. However, because it was so busy even the morons were using the self-checkout. I’m the first to admit that I’m a total technology snob – if you can’t figure it out then you shouldn’t use it. Someone might get hurt. I was sitting there watching idiots read every instruction, try and figure out how and where to insert cash instead of using their credit card, and stop to ask the one cashier in charge of all the self-checkout stations how everything worked and where their coupons would go. I was in agony. By the time I left almost an hour had passed and I was in the same bright, chipper, in-love-with-my-fellow-man mood that I usually get dealing with the customer base at Wal-Mart (“Whadyew mean this Dale Earnheart t-shirt is $1.10? The sine sid $1.08! Wheere’s yer manjer? I ain’t pay’n no $1.10 fer dis shert - dat’s false advertisin! Hold on a sec; BESSIE MAE GIT OFFA DAT DISPLAY OR I WILL SMACK YOU INTA NEXT WEEK!!”).

But as I got back on the road home I noticed three helicopters hovering overhead, which was followed by a serious backup in traffic. Turns out that there had been a train meets cars accident along my route home and that if I hadn’t stopped to pick up ingredients I might have been one of the people in the hospital now, because I would have been about at that rail crossing at the time that the incident happened. Little freaky…

Of course now there’s no way I can ever pay B.Da back. First she gets me the world’s greatest girlfriend and now she saves my life. How does one respond properly? In Aztec times this would have demanded a sacrifice – but I don’t think B.Da would appreciate 50 dead slaves on her front step.