I spent the rest of the week with my parents and their boxes. I moved quite of few of their boxes from one side of their storage room to another as we tried to find a few of their items that remain hidden.
I also made a trip to the family house in Madison County, where my dad grew up and where my grandmother lived until her death in January this past year at the age of 95. The one item that my wife and I wanted to keep from her house was an old Singer sewing machine–the kind on a wooden table with a wrought iron base. Grandmother’s machine must be nearly as old as she was, but the mechanism still turns smoothly. As we were retrieving the sewing machine, we also found an the original copy of one of the property deeds, listing my great-grandfather Zeb Jarrett as a witness. Hopefully I can get it scanned at some point.
Esta arrived on Friday and we followed with the obligatory all-hands family meal at my Uncle Forrest’s. It was a good time–lots of stories, lots of news (my uncle finally got the county to pave the road in front of his house!), lots of fun.
I think Esta and I use blogging as a surrogate for talking to each other sometimes. It says something that in the entire time that we were there, although we both had access to dial-up lines, neither of us updated our blogs. We were too busy making each other laugh with old jokes.
Now it’s Sunday evening and I’m stuck in an airport. This seems to be emerging as a theme recently. This time it’s Newark. I should have looked more closely at my “miracle cheap” ticket–that it went through Newark on Sunday night is going to add another couple of hours to my trip. My flight was supposed to get into Boston at 10; now I don’t expect to get home before midnight, and it’ll be a minor miracle if I get into bed before 1 a.m.
Still, I have to laugh. Having a late flight in Newark on Sunday evening is a bit like owning a stock that’s lost a lot of its value in 2001. You really aren’t in trouble relative to everyone else in the airport unless your flight is much later than everyone else’s. It’s kind of a sliding scale for expectations.
Home
I’m finally here. Found myself thinking on the way in, as I was stuck on a non-moving Blue Line T train, that the cities I’ve lived in have had the underground transportation systems that they deserved. Washington, DC–the silent meditation chamber, where everyone ponders what they’ve done or are about to do (except for the tourists, who can’t sense the tension). In polar opposite, getting onto a Boston train for me is like I’m already home, even if I’m saddled with heavy luggage. The train is crowded, smelly, too warm, but colorful and people for the most part seem relaxed and human. And the Airport station on the Blue Line smells faintly of fish.