On to Atlanta.
After lunch I got back on the road anticipating celebrating Thanksgiving week with my family. Before going to Leslie’s I checked in at the Hyatt and I was in rare form. I was greeted by two smiling young women. After one of them entered my name into the computer she said. “I have you here for four nights. Is that right?”
I looked around the lobby and replied, “I was hoping for a room. If I’m here for four nights, things could get embarrassing.”
“Well then we’ll find you a room. Do you have a preference for a floor?”
“As long as there is one. I don’t levitate well at my age.”
And it went on like that for a bit before I relented, went upstairs and dropped off my bags, and then back down Peachtree Road to Leslie & John’s. Most of what transpired over the next few days was simply the typical sort of family interaction between a group of people related by genetics, marriage, or in some cases previous marriage would have when they are infrequently together. But here’s a rundown of our Thanksgiving table:
My sister Leslie and my current brother-in-law John who were wonderful hosts.
Me who was a wonderful guest.
My nephew Eric, his wife Cindy, and their daughter Maya (who inspired this blog’s name).
Arabella, my late nephew Brian’s wife, and mother of MartinEli and Bram.
My erstwhile brother-in-law, Paul, who is father to Eric, father-in-law to Cindy and Arabella, and grandfather to Maya, MartinEli, and Bram.
Herb, Paul’s father and hence great-grandfather to Maya, MartinEli, and Bram.
Ron, Paul’s brother and paternal great uncle of the three children.
John’s son David, his wife Emily, and their daughters Nila and Fiona.
The picture below shows (clockwise from the left) David holding his daughter Fiona, Ron, Paul, MartinEli, Herb, and Bram.
Other Thanksgiving photos are here:
Sadly missing from the day due to illness were John’s daughter Melissa and her husband Frank.
I will touch on three or four memorable moments. The first occurred Wednesday night and it may turn out to be one of those ‘you had to be there’ moments but I’ll try to describe it. Along with the pictures of Brian and Eric as youngsters that Paul brought, he also brought some old VHS tapes. Amazingly, Leslie and John still have a VCR so we were able to watch them. The first video showed Eric playing little league baseball. Several games were edited together. Paul shot some of the footage and Brian shot some. Brian’s frequently contained humorous and acerbic play by play and commentary ended abruptly when he decided he could no longer watch his little brother pitch in a game that was tied in the fifth or sixth inning.
The second tape was from Eric’s bar mitzvah. This tape included a segment where Paul’s family had gathered around the television and were watching some old movies of various family events they’d had transferred to video tape. So we were watching a tape of an old family event of people watching a tape of an older family event. If that wasn’t funny enough, as we listened to the conversation on the tape, we realized we were essentially saying the same things. But the real highlight came when Leslie, looking at members of Paul’s family, wondered aloud who they were. In a moment of exquisite timing, Paul’s mother Marilyn who died about five months ago, started naming the people in that second tape as if she had heard Leslie’s question.
The other two memory worthy occurrences happened on Friday. The first was our visit to David and Emily’s where we got to see their chicken coop and meet their chickens. Most likely this was more of a highlight for Maya than for me
but these urban chicken coops are a curious phenomenon.
The other happened on the way home when Leslie and I went to her bank to transact some business. Raymond, the young man helping us, gave a cursory initial glance at my driver’s license and, seeing that it was from Maryland, asked me where I lived. “Silver Spring,” I replied, “But Leslie and I both grew up in Baltimore.”
Raymond said that he was originally from Baltimore and asked where we grew up. I answered that we had grown up in the Pimlico area. He told us he’d attended Pimlico Middle School and Leslie and told him that when we’d gone there it was Pimlico Junior High. Zeroing in still further, we learned that we’d all attended PS 234 – Arlington Elementary School. As the conversation continued, it shrunk the world even more because where Les and I had lived in the 5400 block of Gist Avenue, Raymond grew up in a house in the 5300 block of Gist Avenue.
Leslie then broke out into the Arlington School song which Raymond and I both remembered. Raymond stood up, came around from behind his desk and hugged Leslie for evoking those memories. It turns out he was in the band, so he started singing Pimlico’s Alma Mater which Leslie and I vaguely remembered. Seriously, it’s one thing to find a chap from Baltimore working at a Wells Fargo Bank branch in Atlanta. But to compound that by learning that he not only attended the same schools as we had decades earlier but had spent his childhood a bit more than a block from the house where we had lived as children was more than a little mind blowing.
I left early Saturday morning and took a slight detour on my way home to stop at the Memorial Gym on the campus of the University of Virginia to watch Maryland’s final volleyball match of the season – a 3-1 loss to the Cavaliers. If you’re interested, you can read my recap of that here.