Home from the Office

Our daughter came home from college for the first time over Thanksgiving. When we got her at the airport, she looked older, but we still recognized her. More important, she still recognized us. In the meantime, she’s already announced that she’s going to Miami for Spring Break to hang out with her older sister. After we dropped our daughter off at the airport on Sunday morning we went to a wedding. We were the oldest people at our table.

Want another sign that we’re getting on? We decided to meet my wife’s sister and brother in law for Thanksgiving at a restaurant. The El Dorado Hotel in Sonoma is a terrific restaurant with incredible deserts, but turkey, stuffing, and potatoes done up as California Cuisine is a bit strange. For one, Thanksgiving is supposed to be big plates of food, not bits of free-range turkey served with candied cranberries mixed with freshly-shaved cinnamon and cloves. The more serious problem is that we could see almost as much plate as food. My wife’s agnolloti turned out to be the best choice and yes, we’d go back but maybe we’re too traditional in our view that Thanksgiving has nothing to do with the food tasting good, it’s all about purposeful overeating.

We spent Friday at a mall in Fairfield where my mother took her only grandchild shopping, so we did carry out one Thanksgiving tradition. If there’s a recession on, they didn’t tell anyone in Fairfield. The parking lot there was full. They also never seem to tell my mother about these recession things, at least when it comes to our daughter. We then went out for Japanese food and I got to complain about trendy sushi that comes deep-fried and often doesn’t even contain raw fish. What’s with mayonnaise and cream cheese in sushi anyway? In any case, this place was so traditional Japanese that their sushi was mostly raw fish, imagine that. I went to one place in Sacramento where they had filet mignon sushi (the beef was cooked). Talk about seriously unclear on the concept. Naturally that place was insanely busy and the little mom and pop (should it be mama san and papa san?) in Fairfield was mostly empty.

On Saturday night, we had packed the station wagon and were getting ready to have dinner at our daughter’s favored pizza place, Mary’s when the rear passenger tire started hissing. Instead of eating, we drove home, tire still more or less intact, and packed everything into the Honda Civic then drove back to another Mary’s then on to one of those airport motels in Millbrae. Most of the place was under construction and we’re convinced that they forgot to put sound insulation on the floor above us. We were in a handicapped room (by accident) and the people above must have been in the Elephant march room. Every five minutes at three in the morning, one of them would do some sort of jig. We never slept.

In fact the one bit of the Thanksgiving that felt like our daughter really was back at home was Friday night when we decided to just hang out and watch multiple episodes of the Office through Netflix’s download service. For the last few years, the pattern’s been that she starts watching something and we start watching with her, hence American Idol, the Bachelor, Law and Order SVU, and I guess now the Office. One of the odd things about Netflix is that I get to see what she’s been downloading :}. The Office is 21 minutes long and I think we watched 8 installments of Jim and Pam, Mike, etc.

We’re well aware that the number of times our daughter will still think of coming home as “home” rather than leaving “home” to visit her parents can probably be counted on two hands. Our older daughter tells us that she’s the only one of her friends who comes “home” for as long as she does. Her friends spend a couple days seeing their parents and brothers and sisters then go have their vacation rather than say staying for a week or more. In a way, it’s a good sign. Our kids don’t need us anymore to the extent that they’ve started to think of wherever they live as home, yet they still like coming home for more than the obligatory amount. I just wish Thanksgiving had been a lot longer. In the meantime, we missed our daughter again last night so we watched two more episodes of the Office (the American version).
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