Thursday morning, flew cross country from Portland to Philadelphia through Denver on Southwest airlines with my fastidious father and anxiety riddled mother who chooses to fill any silence in the air with idle chit-chat and vapid questions that really don't need to be asked. Apparently, I walk too fast for them and they didn't much like it that I went through the TSA security line without them, despite the fact that we had 90 minutes until our flight was away.
Because my father fails at technology like Homer fails at sobriety, he wasn't able to figure out how to print boarding passes the night before, so I was essentially last in the cattle call for SW, meaning I was forced into the middle seat next to a white Shaquile O'Neal and an elderly woman who spent 99% of her time fidgeting through her gigantic purse to pull out tissues, lotion, mini-candies, snacks, lamps, rabbits, fuzzy dice and a Yugo. Meanwhile, my mother who was more than a few rows back kept shouting out my name to get me to turn around to see if I would be interested in shouting back over the sleeping passengers to talk about frivolous and trivial topics.
When we landed in Denver, my mother vowed to secure three seats together using her combination of award winning charm and obnoxious persistence. I disavowed her of that plan by selecting the first open seat I could find between a relatively attractive Asian gal and a slim, thin, neat gay man. It was between these two smaller, calmer creatures that I began to use up my free drink coupons like St Louis Bob uses up tissues near his home computer.
We arrived in Phily at 7:30pm and were welcomed off the plane by my sister who whined to my parents about not coming to this wedding a few days prior and despite the fact my mother has sworn up and down she wouldn't help my sister out with any money bought her a last minute ticket to Phily at what I can only presume was a high cost.
They went to luggage and secured our bags while I took a rather long bus ride to Thrifty Rental car where Hotwire
gifted me with a royal blue Mercury Grand Marquis for the price of a compact. I would have preferred a Smart Car or a roller skate. This thing was a gigantic boat with a trunk big enough to hold at least 4 bodies. I would have liked to have stashed at least 3 bodies in there for the long ride to my Aunt's house near Valley Forge. Every time my speedometer climbed over the speed limit, my mother would shout out "SLOW DOWN!". Did I mention this car had two speedometers? God love the American made behemoths.
At my aunt's house was my cousin, who was getting married this Sat and her husband to be Tim. Tim’s sister and mother were there as well as some other people I’d never met before. Nice folks, but I had important business at 9pm. That's when the Ducks were kicking off. But I had a better chance of giving birth than I did of leaving this madness for a sports bar. My aunt, who is an 'antique dealer', swore up and down she had a nice TV to watch the game. It was an antique itself and about the size of a King Charles Spaniel. And now I get to mention her husband, who is, beyond a doubt, the loudest, most annoying human being on the planet. Every story you have will be topped by this clown. Most of his stories start off with him gesticulating wildly before realizing he doesn't even have a point to any of them and will tend to sit back down with his tail between his legs. His wife treats him like a monkey-butler and constantly shouts him down.
To make matters worse, this jackhole has Tivo, so anytime somebody said anything huddled around the TV, he would rewind the game and restart it. Only he operated this thing like Woz might a Space Shuttle and so you never had any real sense of what was happening in the most critical of moments. And he was flipping around between the Ducks and the Yankees like a man on crack and I never before wanted to pick a man up and remove him from his own house in all my life but I swear I got close.
I didn't check into my hotel until 1:30am. My dad and I planned to go to Gettysburg the next morning. It's a two hour drive from where we were and we had a 10am reservation to take a tour. This man has an obsession with being early. That meant a 6am wake up call. Did I mention that the night before I went bowling with Cosjobs, my wife and two sons?