Turkey Trot

A year ago we still held to the idea of family unity and I shared in Thanksgiving at the house with my (ex)wife and sons, one of their girlfriends, and my mother. This year my ex made it clear my mother and I were not invited. I think she's finally passed from denial into anger.

My son and his girlfriend had two Thanksgivings that day and probably will this time too. He spends more holiday time with her family than with his own, and I don't entirely blame him.

I don't really know how my other son feels about it. I don't see a lot of value in trying to find out.

I would probably be all right doing without Thanksgiving entirely, but I suspect thinking so is a manifestation of my own capacity for denial. At any rate, I'd like my mother to have a better option than the dining hall at her new residence. I've never surveyed restaurants that are open on Thanksgiving, but I know they exist, and it might be a fun sort of adventure for us.

A very close friend has made it a practice to not do Thanksgiving, as a means I think of managing expectations, and instead takes her children to Disneyland and out for Chinese. They're all very close, and so I don't see the down side to that which I imagine others might. In fact, I've no doubt most kids would much rather go to Disneyland than to some cousin's house for stinky aunts and drunken uncles and televised football.

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It is also a practice this time of year to enumerate blessings. I tend to do that sort of at random moments, and privately; or if my thanks need expressing, I won't wait until a designated day. So I have no special list of thankfulness to share with the world now. None but the usual: The people in my life who make living such a wonderful and amazing experience. James and Kenneth and gekko and Sunny come to mind immediately; but there are many others. The moment I have to give an instant's thought to it, though, is the moment to stop and just say to the universe at large: Thank You.

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I was going to do a Social in Austin followup post so here goes. I was actually rather surprised at how the week unfolded.

The number a girl had given me on the street and which I later deleted was still in my sent-messages list. I saw it a few days later and on a whim sent a smiling face picture. A couple three days later she responded with a Who is this? I told her, and told the story of our meeting, and she replied that she remembered, and asked if I was back in Cali and so on. On Saturday we had a little more friendly texting, and then late Sunday night, she sent another, asking where did I live in Cali, and what kind of work did I do, and saying we should meet for lunch or a few drinks. Mind, this is a slim and pretty little girl in her 20s, tough looking, with jeans tucked into her boots and a cigarette, and I'm just an old roué she hasn't seen in over a week. But I had been back home for a few hours and told her so, and that, I suspect, is that.

On Thursday I found no open tables in the company cafeteria and for sharing chose the one occupied by a young woman with an admirable figure I'd seen walk by a couple days before. She was very friendly, and when I "accidentally" happened by her cube at the end of the day we had a high-energy and wide-ranging conversation such that I would surely have asked her out if she wasn't going to Mexico on the weekend for a friend's wedding. We've since emailed a little.

The woman I'd taken to dinner and meant to go with again got very busy, being Director of Operations for a local nonprofit, and between that, the fact she had a life down there, and my 12-hour days, we never found a second time. But as I flew home she contacted me again, and we decided to remain in contact against the next time one of us visits the other's part of the country. She is most interesting, being not just beautiful and shapely but in her 40s, rather than in her 20s as the other two, with a grown child and an established career, and therefore a more natural companion.

I wrote all this out not only because I like to tell stories, but to highlight this slightly odd imbalance. Both gekko and Sunny have encouraged me to find the keys to unlocking my particular social shell and make new friends for fun and romance and yet I have barely done so in all this time. Connections, for me, are terribly elusive. Then I went to Austin and made three connections with lovely women all in one week, all of them bearing the possibility of further development. Well, now they're on hold, and I'm back at home, and potentially back to "normal".

But I know there's no real difference between Austin and Sacramento. The difference was me, some subtlety in my outlook or my presence brought forth by being on travel and out of town. My task is to capture whatever that side of me is, and let the world I actually live in see it. After all, it's from these interpersonal interactions that I learn the most about myself, and I have a hell of a lot to learn.