Thanksgiving Drive-Thru
Thursday morning, 6am: Taxi picks me up from the residency. Taxi company is a husband and wife team, and they’ve both showed up today out of solidarity/sleeplessness. It’s still night outside. I snuggle into the back seat and they take off, murmuring gently between them, the radio on. It’s a comforting, confusing way to begin a long travel to visit family; I feel like I am the adopted daughter of the cab drivers and that we have a long journey ahead of us. When really they will deposit me at the airport to take a flight to Charlotte and then Detroit, where my real parents will pick me up at the airport for a drive to Ohio. When we used to take road trips from Atlanta to Ohio, in the eighties, we would begin at this early hour and I would wake as it was growing light, in time for breakfast at McDonald’s.
Scene 2: Lunch at McDonalds
In the Detroit Airport at Thanksgiving, there are a lot of people grappling with the fact that they’re back in the Midwest, or increasing degrees of Midwest. One girl complains loudly on her phone: “It’s weird to be in the Midwest again. This is not Ohio.” I try to puzzle out the spectrum; where Indiana fits vs. Ohio vs. Michigan vs Minnesota. I find my parents and we drive to my uncle’s farmhouse in Ohio. On the way, we stop at McDonald’s for lunch. Only the Drive-Thru is open. We wait interminably, crawling forward. Finally we advance to the intercom, which announces that BLTs are on sale and asks us to place our order. We do so, and continue talking about my time in Virginia. This is taking way too long, my mom says. Repeat the order again, we tell my dad. He does so. We wait a little longer; I tell them about hunting season down South. Then we get indignant again. Just drive up to the window, we tell Dad. They can’t make you drive backwards. We go forward and peer through the window, waiting. But inside it’s all dark. We go to the next window. Same thing. The place is closed. But the cars driving away, ahead of us, proceeded in time intervals that suggested they had ordered, paid, and received their food; not that they had found out the place was closed and had driven off. We decided we would be different, magnanimous. We drove up to each car in line, gesticulating like mad, yelling “It’s closed!” as cheerfully as though we were shouting “Happy Thanksgiving!” One man smacked his head and started giggling with us. Another lady told us, unnecessarily, that she had been waiting in line to buy her dog a hamburger.
Scene #3: The Assisted Living Home
Thanksgiving dinner was held with my grandparents at their assisted living home. There is an eerie kinship to the residency where I have spent the past three weeks and assisted living setups, as what an artist residency offers is, essentially, assisted living. There were the same small rooms, the same dining hall, the same small waves at other residents, the same phenomenon of residents muttering to themselves, occupied with other worlds. More walkers here, though. My grandparents were inquisitive, gently teasing, and spectacularly enthroned in their twin La-Z-Boy armchairs. Dinner was chicken Kiev or pepper beef. Nobody got too full. My mother had brought a pecan pie from Minneapolis which we lingered over in their room, relieved to be away from the dining hall fluorescence.