My flight was scheduled to take off at 6:30 yesterday morning. Because the Garden State had been covered in a sheet of ice and slush plus a wind condition the day before I feared delays. But luckily if it weren't for the one socially inept on a plane family playing musical seats in 3 different rows, we would have been all seated and boarded and taxiing away right on time. Thanks to the heavily drinking (Yes! At 6:30 IN THE MORNING!) and yet somehow still unable to sit still mother, the rest of us who were half asleep because we had to drag our butts out of bed at 4AM and not because we enjoyed screwdriver after screw driver people were only about 10 minutes behind schedule.
I got all happy when we pulled away from the gate because SUNRISE! And I knew that if we didn't linger on the runway too long that chances are we would get to see the sunrise from the air AND I was on the east facing side of the plane. Yay!
We took off and the sights outside the window did not disappoint. Sunrise combined with a zillion lights of the city. And I sat there, in the middle seat, totally annoying my boys by saying "OMG! Do you see that? Isn't that gorgeous? Look look look!!! Look over there!" And then we flew through the clouds and I was going to see another sunrise from above the clouds. It was like beautiful groundhog day! I was just about giddy over it!
And then the flight attendant came on and said that today we would see a "feature". Hello! SCORE! No lame sit-coms! But then the flight attendant said "Today's feature will be "Fred Claus" and my heart re-blackened. But I dragged myself off the ledge knowing that I could also now use my approved iphone device and listen to the new Seal - Soul album I just got for the trip (because Fred Claus? I don't think so...) and also see the sun rise over a landscape of clouds. And then the flight attendant came on and asked us all to lower our window shades so that people could see Fred Claus but the sun rise hadn't reached maximum color show yet and I realized that being asked to shut out an above the clouds sunrise so as not to distract from Fred Claus is probably the clearest indication ever of everything wrong with our world today.
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Back when I was in college my boyfriend and I went to visit friends who had bought their own house. We got to their house late at night and the friend said that they did not have a spare mattress. They thought that we should sleep on the plywood platform bed frame in the spare bedroom anyway, so we could be in a bedroom. So boyfriend and I spent the night tossing and turning but not really sleeping on that plywood platform.
About 5 years ago in my mom's florida house (which is now my dad's house, except every inch of the house screams "Mom and her love of pastel colors and asian looking bric a brac was here") my mom finally upgraded from a queen sized to a king sized bed. For a couple of years she put her old queen mattress on top of the queen mattress in what used to be lil sis's room. So, first of all, the bed was oddly high in the air with two mattresses and a box spring in a smallish room and second of all two mattresses on top of each other feel like what I imagine it feels like if you sleep on top of a four foot high spray oil coated jello cube because the top mattress kind of slid around up there on top of the bottom mattress and when I would turn over in my sleep I'd have to find some level of consciousness to be certain that I wasn't going to end up sledding off the side of the lower mattress and go crashing into dad's fax machine.
The extra mattress is gone now, but the mattress that remains seems to have solidified or something. Last night every time I woke up to realize that I had lost circulation and all all feeling in my hip (side sleeper that I am ) I thought for a second that I was 21 and sleeping on that plywood platform.
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Dad looks pretty good. He is glad that his friends are not inviting him over for dinner every single night anymore. It was getting to be too much. We talked about how it has been 6 months since mom died and how that last 6 months have felt both like a lifetime and like a moment.
And you are not going to believe this.
Are you sitting down?
Dad's tv started turning on in the middle of the night too.
And then last night, his reliable (but I know it's like 30 years old) tv just kind of went to static. Freaky no?
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