a funny thing happened on the way to Syracuse,

Last week I visited Texas for a family get-together we call the Ogg-in (Ogg is my mother’s maiden name); it is a big family, close and fun. This tradition of getting together in June started about four or five years ago, and my uncle said it was my fault, it was a year when I was back in Texas and my mom wanted to try to get everyone together one more time before I moved...I’ll take the blame—this party is well worth being held responsible for. Like everyone, I’m sure, I come from a diverse, interesting and colorful family that includes CFOs and mechanics, soldiers, bankers, teachers, actors, carpenters, nurses, and more than a few food professionals and food lovers—Uncle Jim and Aunt Suzie, who host the party, have a catering business run out of a kitchen my uncle built himself on the back half of their hill country home in Marble Falls, Texas.



Uncle Jim moved to Marble Falls in High School with his parents in an intermission from their life in my home town of Bryan. The way I’ve heard the story, my Granddaddy Leo and my Grandmother Chris (Christine, as in ‘Abigail Christine’) loved the Hill Country and vacationed there frequently and finally decided to stay for a bit. They had a picture framing business called ‘The Mitre Box’ (which my uncle bought back and ran as well, years later), and my uncle (the youngest of five siblings) was the only one who actually still lived with his folks while they were there. Good thing, too, because that’s where he met the love of his life, and Suzie is assuredly one the sweetest people ever born. They are very comfortable in Marble Falls; it is a beautiful area, with probably the most rewarding scenery in Texas—beautiful slopes melting into glassy rivers and lakes, bright and quiet and just green enough to provide a spare but adequate shade from the powerful Texas summer sun. Their generosity and efficiency as hosts is only equaled by their warmth, humour, and pleasant company as people and this family event is well worth traveling from Canada to enjoy.



The drive my grandparents made from Bryan to vacation in Marble Falls is about 3 hours. From Canada, it’s more like three days, if you’re hopped up on bennies and willing to wear a catheter. Vacationing, but perhaps even more strange, living far away from home, in the age of the airplane, has come to mean a very different thing than it did in times past. Being spread out, as we are, can now mean living thousands of miles from family and loved ones, without, thanks to the internet and relatively cheap plane tickets, necessarily even feeling removed. But this separation, at least for the not so rich and famous such as ourselves, has also come to affect the ways and whys of how we vacation.



At the outset of this adventure, I coined the word ‘oblication’ to describe my attitude about the number of stops expected of us during our short visit, a visit cut even shorter by the (gasp) loss of a half days travel when our plane missed its connection in Newark on the way down. It is a weird world in which a 1000 mile trip is considered inconvenient by taking more than half a day. But that is, nevertheless, how it feels. With numerous friends, family and a month’s worth of ‘important’ stops to make in a week’s trip, the pressure to ‘oblige’ makes the desire to ‘vacate’ seem very appealing. But oblige we did, and when we could, vacate we did as well; which was actually fairly easy to do under the guidance of our excellent west Texas hosts.



We spent a day or two in Austin, where I visited my recently rebuilt old haunt of Mother’s Café, which seems to have survived the fire without having suffered much pain in the way of rebirth...we met a new young friend, a second daughter to one of my oldest friends, just hours after her birth. We visited Boggy Creek Farm and chatted with other friends of ours (as well as Uncle Jim and Aunt Suzie’s), Carol Ann Sayle and Larry Butler, the urban farmers who inspire me as much or more than any other two folks alive. And we took a day in Dripping Springs to play some music, grill some veggies, help build a lego city and enjoy the incredible Hill Country sunset with some other old friends and their children. We didn’t manage to do about seventeen other things that we had promised ourselves that we definitely would...but in the end, I think we did just about enough.



The weekend was spent enjoying family at the Ogg-in, introducing Abigail to her cousins for the first time and playing washers while drinking longnecks, crowding around jigsaw puzzles, eating well and smiling, laughing, maybe even crying, just a little, for a couple of folks who should have been there, and had been there in years before, and were still there, in a way...



Then a stop at home, my parents’ house, where I can’t seem to sleep anywhere except for my old room, even though my sister’s old room has a bigger bed and its own bathroom. Some habits are hard to break. I could have spent the whole week in that room—it is like visiting a younger version of my self; it is amazing how much of our inner lives are scripted in those teenage bedrooms, and how much of that inner dialogue follows us in the years that pass as we grow. I still go through all the drawers, expecting to find some document or talisman that proves that room is still mine. This time, I saw an old green blanket on the shelf of the closet—I remembered its smell on the cool evenings of my youth when it kept me warm in my insomnia, my brain racing to capture all those important things before they faded, never realizing that those thoughts would still be with me to mull over for the rest of my years...



Thoughts like how we live and love and what it means to be alive and live well. What it means to be good and to be happy. What it means to be successful. Thoughts about God and atheism, about sneaking out the window (the screen is still broken, another reminder...), and thoughts about things like drugs and sex, even death, and about what it means to feel good and how.



Abigail was a champ, she flew well, and (with maybe one exception) was in good spirits for the duration of the often blisteringly hot, sometimes chaotic and always completely new to her experience of the whole adventure. Even when we hit the worst of it.



We can’t seem to fly through Newark without some glitch...even on previous trips, that airport has tripped us up with delays, weather issues and the like. Our trip home looked OK, we had a mechanical issue with our scheduled plane, but the airline kicked us over to another small jet at another gate in record time—even the flight attendant seemed impressed. We took off on schedule and seemed to be moving well...we were about halfway to Syracuse when the weather hit. Nicole, Abigail and I were in the last row, which is, I understand, the worst spot for a bumpy ride, but this seemed even more violent than usual, it didn’t help that a pilot on the next row looked visibly alarmed by ‘the ride’, the seatbelt lights were on and the flight attendant was buckled in and using phrases like ‘a little rough’ and ‘looking for a better route’. Nicole had her head between her knees and was breathing like she did the day we met Abigail and I realized I couldn’t keep reading and should probably put my book away. The tension was palpable. The pilots were quiet, focused, and the plane was loud with sound of whitening knuckles and gritting teeth. I was feeling something I knew I was supposed to feel, anxiety, tightening in my neck and tensing my arms around my girls. Fearing for my daughter, coaching Nicole in her breaths; but then, suddenly, calm.



Suddenly I was back in my old room, smelling that blanket, staring out the broken screen. I was thinking, what if this is it?



The plane hit a hail storm; it was a quick, loud metallic ripping noise. Not a noise you want to hear 20,000 feet in the air. The pilot in the adjacent row lifted up in her seat. The wingtip pointed down and our (excellent) captain swung us around and out of there. A minute later, the flight attendant told us that we were going back to Newark and blah, blah, blah. I was still lost in my calm.



What if this is it? I have the best job in the world. I have the most beautiful daughter in the world. I have found the love of my life. I have few regrets and I have just spent a week in the company of many of the people I love most in the world. What if this is it? Well, OK. I’ve done quite well—better than that teenage kid could have ever imagined. More than lucky, I am blessed. I don’t crave death, this is not some sick wish, I just realized, all over, with a sense of shock that no matter what happened, I couldn’t control it, and if this was it, well, OK.



Suddenly ‘oblication’ felt like far too harsh a critique. I felt lucky, so damn lucky for every moment I had spent in the last few days with the folks I loved so much. I felt so lucky for the last several years, in fact, for the whole life I’ve had. Much of me knew that we weren’t going down, but I did know that we could, just as we could all meet our moment at any time, whether we liked the idea or not. The important thing was that something about that moment reminded me to think about those big thoughts, the ones I used to chase wrapped in that old green blanket on those sleepless nights in my room at home. I knew that we probably weren’t going down but I also knew that if we did, that if this was it, there wasn’t one thing that I could do about it.



The plane leveled out and left the clouds. We found our way back to Newark and were ‘inconvenienced’ by another six or seven hour wait. Eventually, we made it home; back to Kemptville, to the branch, to our other family, here.



Abigail slept through the whole thing, safe in her daddy’s arm, my other arm around Nicole, reminding her to breathe, calm, and smiling.