It was a good Thanksgiving. Got to go have dinner with the family. Eat way too much food. Im sure that a lot of you are also friends with my father and have already read this, but get over it. This is something he wrote on the first thanksgiving after we lost my mom. We were headed to spend a few days at Fairmont Hot-springs and trying to enjoy it. I dont think i could have said it better. Even though it is Thanksgiving and we got to spend time with some of the family, it really did just feel like a Thursday. Saturday, November 24, 2007 As we were driving to Butte on Thursday morning there were a lot of trucks on the road. They were doing their everyday job and had places to go and cargo to deliver. The day after Thanksgiving sales were imminent and freight had to be in place at so many stores. It occurred to me that for many of those truck drivers, it wasn’t Thanksgiving at all, it was just Thursday. We stopped in Missoula for lunch at a Perkins, which seemed to be the only place open in the whole damn town. It was pretty busy and as we were sitting there I wondered how many of the people in there were going somewhere like us and just stopped on the way to grab a bite to eat before moving on. In the same note I wondered if some of these people were there because they really didn’t have anyone and or anywhere else to go to on the holiday. That kind of depressed me. As we got closer to Butte and the hot springs, the temperature kept dropping. By the time we got there it was -7. It never really warmed up much above 5 or 10 the whole time we were there and mostly it was 0 and below 0. After we checked in to the resort and swam for a while we drove in to Butte to see if there was any place to get some Thanksgiving dinner. Alas, nothing was open there either except another Perkins and a Walmart. So we went to Walmart and got some sandwich stuff and some other junk. As we were checking out the lady asked how we were doing. I said, “Well, we’re tailgating Thanksgiving dinner in a Walmart parking lot in Butte Montana, How do you think it’s going?” She didn’t think I was funny. To get to the outdoor pool at the hotsprings, you have to go thru a hallway with a door at the end of it. When you open the door, the wind rushes in, and at -5 it’s a damn cold wind. Still, we did it over and over. Like in the movie Christmas Story when the boy sticks his tongue to a metal pole, you didn’t dare grab the metal ladder rails to get out of the pool or your hands would freeze to it, and, you had to be careful walking back to the inside pool so your feet didn’t freeze down. We have a short video clip of the door. I didn’t load it yet but maybe will tomorrow. We had fun. It really is a blast swimming outside when its below zero. And late at night, when there aren’t many people out there, and the moon is full and your wet hair freezes in about 30 seconds, it reminds you that you’re alive and it’s a great experience. But, it wasn’t Thanksgiving. No big turkey, no big family gathering, and no Karen. That’s a hard, hard thing. We had fun, we had a good time, we enjoyed the hot water and the cold air, but Karen wasn’t there, and it wasn’t Thanksgiving. It was just Thursday. march on
Posted on: Fri, 28 Nov 2014 05:15:28 +0000
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