illusionofjoy | Transport, motorways and tramways, starting and then stopping, taking off and landing...

Last night I returned from the Thanksgiving family reunion in Texas. missjoi was there to meet me at the airport and drive me home. I was incredibly happy to see her, and happy to see Pittsburgh as well, since I've little love for any state to the south of the Mason-Dixon line. As a matter of fact, I think Texas is probably my least favourite state in the Union. While the landmass itself I have no quarrel with, it's the reasons I've always had to go there and the consequences of my presence that make me not want to go back. I knew this even before I agreed to go to this year's family reunion.

Now, it is of note that when I refer to "family," I am referring to my mother's side of the family, not my late father's side. I have no issues with my father's side of the family. In fact, I quite like my father's side of the family. I don't get on so well with my mother's side, as incidents as previous reunions will attest to. However, I have nothing against my grandmother (my mother's mother, as my father's mother, like my father, is deceased), so when my mother called up and asked if I would go to the reunion, I agreed, stating very clearly that I was going for the benefit of my grandmother and pretty much no one else.

I also told my mother that the only way she would get me out of Pittsburgh would be to pay for the plane tickets. Furthermore, she was to get me back into the steel city the day after Thanksgiving. I did not want to linger. She agreed, mailed me my tickets and I took two days off from work.

Wednesday morning I woke up, packed and took the trolley downtown, where I transferred to the 28X "Airport Flyer" bus. I had decided to get what some would consider to be a ridiculous head start on the day, as I had no idea what potential horrors might await me at the airport security checkpoints.

I arrived at the airport a little before noon. My flight wasn't scheduled to leave until five in the evening. Walking up to security, I expected some sort of Gestapo nightmare, honestly. As it turned out, I went through the security checkpoint at Pittsburgh International with no problems. Security is indeed higher than it was when I last flew (six years ago), but the same rule still applies now as it did then: don't do anything stupid!

The flight from Pittsburgh to Houston wasn't bad. Airplane food seems to have declined in quality, a circumstance that I didn't think possible. The flight into Houston was delayed, which made me worried that I had missed my connecting commuter flight to College Station. As it stood, the commuter flight was also delayed, so I was able to catch it. Unfortunately, they were unable to land in College Station due to heavy fog. So, the plane flew all the way to the town and then flew all the way back to Houston. I had to get my ticket rescheduled for the first flight to College Station that morning.

This was when the good fortune of my journey unravelled. My mother had neglected to leave a phone number for me to call in the event that something came up. She also didn't have the presence of mind to call my cell phone, to ask what was going on. The reunion was to be held in College Station, home to Texas A & M University, just two driving hours north of Houston. I, however, was stuck in Houston for the night because my 9:00PM flight was fogged out and the next plane didn't depart until 6:00AM. As I couldn't afford a hotel room for the night, I was stuck waiting in the airport for time to pass by. It was not an experience I wish to ever relive. Especially since I was out of cold medicine and had to pay $1.75 for water out of a vending machine to take my final cold pills as there were no drinking fountains in sight!

The morning of Thanksgiving, I went through Houston's airport security where I was picked for a random screening. After they determined that I prefer riding on planes rather than blowing them out of the sky, I went to my terminal to catch my commuter flight (not before buying more cold medicine, however).

This time around there was no fog, the flight was not delayed and it landed on time as well. During the night I had spent in Houston's airport, I had decided to call my relatives in New York, to see if my mother had left a number with them. She had, and I called it, filling her in on the flight cancellation, etc. She told me that she already knew about the cancellation and the rescheduling, which prompted me to admonish her for not bothering to call me. In the mindset that "she must already know," I was annoyed to arrive on the ground Thanksgiving morning to see no one there to pick me up from the airport. Hence, I gave my mother yet another phone call, this time telling her to get out of bed and pick me up.

The reunion itself was a time for me to sit back and hope to remain unnoticed. Still wiped out from my cold and further enervated by a lack of sleep, I actually spent most of the day napping on the sofa. When I was awake, I observed that most of my relatives haven't changed much, aside from being older. I did talk to my grandmother briefly and she remains one of my favourites. I also discovered that one of my cousins has, like me, walk down the path of non-conformity in his post-teenage years. Unlike me, he went the way of the vegetarian hippie, but he was still the only other relative I felt comfortable talking to during the reunion.

All in all, the whole thing went by without any major incidents, which means it was a good reunion. Still, it would have nice to have not have to heard, "blonde hair is so much nicer than black," from the aunt who wants to be everyone's mother, but considering that was the worst that happened...

I was glad to get back to Pittsburgh. My flight to here from Houston went very smoothly, the only exception being a gate change about an hour before boarding call. Out of my window, I could see the Texan landscape; it was a patchwork of farmland, dotted with small towns and larger municipalities whose industrial districts were completely comprised of petroleum processing plants. I was glad to be in the air away from the landscape, rather than in it.

On the ground, I saw several things that reminded me of why I don't like Texas. For one thing, the highways of Texas are filled to the brim with pickup trucks and SUVs. I don't think I saw one compact car the whole time I was in the state. Also, I read a billboard emblazoned with the phrase, "Join the new majority...vote Republican." While I was stuck in the airport in Houston, every thirty minutes I would hear an announcement over the intercom about the security measures in place that ended with, "...and remember, any inappropriate remarks or jokes about security may be cause for your arrest." I didn't hear such a thing in Pittsburgh.

It's good to be home.