A note about
knowing the score
As anyone who traveled, especially by air, over Thanksgiving can tell you, getting there most definitely is not half the fun.
With Marion’s merry-go-round broke down, I and my kin had the Looney Tunes idea of visiting grandson Henry instead of Central Park this Thanksgiving.
It was great seeing him, his sisters, and his parents, but travel was a classic example of hurry up and wait.
Flying there involved running through O’Hare Airport to be the last person to board a flight held solely on my account — which I’m sure made me quite popular with other passengers forced to sit on the tarmac for nearly an hour.
Flying home was even worse. A planned but definitely not desired five-hour layover at O’Hare swelled to nearly 11 hours with flight delays. By the time I got home, it was 5:45 a.m. I had started my trek before noon. Even with losing an hour by crossing back into Central time, flying took 18¾ hours. Driving would have taken just a bit more than half that.
Still, it was a wonderful opportunity to see Henry’s palatial dorm room — truly a palace only if you’re a sneaker shoe-horned into a closet — and to watch him perform multiple times as part of the Purdue University band.
Henry is studying quite literally to be a rocket scientist. Whether he chose Purdue for its highly rated aerospace engineering program — the same one first-man-on-the-moon Neil Armstrong attended — or because of its All-American Band, one of the country’s best, has never been entirely clear.
We were able to watch his top-rated Boilermaker basketball team totally dominate an opponent, and then sat outside in 20-degree weather not so much to watch his very outclassed Boilermaker football team be dominated by the nation’s second-ranked team.
Half the stadium crowd left at halftime — not at the start, however. They waited to watch the best entertainment of the evening — Henry on sousaphone with 300 friends — perform one of the best halftime shows this former college sousaphone player has ever seen.
The next day, it was volleyball, with Henry again in the band and the team at least deserving of the quality of music performed.
Purdue is an interesting campus, and the people seem less snooty than typical college town folks. Still, they don’t hold a candle to the fine folks hereabouts. Once Marion’s merry-go-round is back squeak-squawking away, we may be able to resume our normal tradition of having Thanksgiving here.
Still a bit bleary-eyed from my 5:45 a.m. arrival, I was reminded of the good and honest folks who live hereabouts.
A gentleman — and I use that term advisedly — walked into our office soon after I returned and stuck a couple of dollars in a jar where people pay for papers they buy over the counter.
He wasn’t buying another paper, however. He’s been picking his up at one of our vending machines and noted that we still haven’t been able to switch them over from charging four quarters to charging six.
Four weeks of keeping two extra quarters in his pocket left him feeling honor-bound to drop them off, so he made the trip and deposited his largess.
Where else but Marion County would you find people so forthrightly honest?
Putting out a paper after an unexpected all-nighter — while also unexpectedly down two full-timers and having a third have to work from home — isn’t exactly the stuff of Thanksgiving. But family and unforced morality most definitely are.
— ERIC MEYER