Thanksgiving 2018, Part Two

The day before Thanksgiving I was in Dublin, OH driving around with my college roommate Jimmy, who lived there for many years.  We visited his mother's and stepfather's gravesite, which had an interesting gravestone for the two--it has an Eastern Airlines commercial jet inscribed on it under his stepfather's name, Peace.  It's quite distinctive, remarkable even, with the prominent word PEACE across its top in bold letters with a jet flying underneath it.  Harvey Peace was a pilot for Eastern and retired when the airline followed TWA into oblivion in the shake-out that occurred following the de-regulation of the airlines in the sixties and seventies.

At noon I went to the hospital where I met my sister and we visited her mother-in-law in the massive Riverside Methodist hospital complex in Columbus.  She was lying comfortably with one of her daughters in attendance, although she wasn't responsive for the most part.  Her son came in and two of her grandsons as well, so she had plenty of loved ones at her bedside.

As evening approached, I went to stay at the place Jimmy was staying at and we called three or four of our friends from our Sewell Hall days at CU.  It was good to catch up with the ones we reached, although we talked a lot about heart attacks, surgeries and other medical maladies in addition to the raucous good old days.  Thanksgiving day I went to visit Jimmy's Uncle with Jimmy and then at noon I went over to my sister's house and we went to visit her mother-in-law, whose condition was pretty much the same, where I met one of the other daughters, who had flown in to spend Thanksgiving with her sister, brother and mother.

That evening there was too much personal sadness going on for a Thanksgiving turkey to be cooked, plus my sister's husband, a gourmet cook, was ill, so we procured some take-out Korean food to enjoy for dinner and braved Black Friday at Walmarts to get the birthday boy in the house a birthday cake.  Black Friday now starts on Thursday.  The birthday party was nice, I gave my nephew a book on the Little Bighorn Battle, which in my youth was called the Custer Massacre.