Thanksgiving Adventures

In order to maintain a 9-year old tradition, we flew to New Jersey last week to spend the Thanksgiving weekend with our friends S&P, R&H, and A&D but before I get into those gory details, there is one correction from the last blog – I had listed my lovely sis-in-law-cum-my-partner-in-crime-for-this-blog Kanya Bahwa’s e-mail ID as iamsopretty@pink-cerelac.in. Many of you reported that it did not work when you tried to lodge a complaint against my blog. That was an honest mistake on my part. Turned out that Kanya had, in the mean time, changed her blog’s name from Pink-Cerelac to Malai-Chop (or was it Style-Shop?… I am not sure now and it does not matter anyway). So if you are still trying to reach out to her, you can do so by sending an e-mail to whydoyouthinkicare@malai-chop.in.

So coming back to our Thanksgiving weekend… it was great to see our friends in NJ who are still going through some post-traumatic stress. No, it is NOT due to hurricane Sandy. It is the natural reaction after you are done with the Black Friday shopping, which, this year actually started on Thursday evening at 9 PM. In the past, there used to be at least one day between saying thanks and then crushing your fellow shoppers during the stampede to race to the highly discounted merchandise at Best Buy when it opened its doors at 5 AM. But now, both of these activities take place the same day. The funny thing is that we still call it “Thanksgiving”…..God Bless America!!

And talking about Hurricane Sandy – I closely follow the names given to hurricanes and after years of observations, I can conclude that there is a racial discrimination in hurricane names. You hear about Hurricane Katrina (no, not Katrina Kaif but the one which devastated New Orleans in 2005…though Kaif herself is no less than a hurricane either and has probably devastated many lives as well) or Hurricane Irene, or Hurricane Sandy. This is because these are the Americans who give only Anglo-Saxon names to the hurricanes. After moving to Canada, I realize how diverse this country is. So I am sure that if Canadians were assigning names to hurricanes, the typical weather news would be - “Hurricane Gurudyal Singh Dhillon is going to hit the northern Ontario this evening” or “Hurricane Skanda Subramanian Balasubramanian has been downgraded to a tropical storm” or “Hurricane Chinchoo Hwang Zhang can bring winds up to 125 kilometers/hour (for my American friends this translates into 78.125 miles/hour) to Montreal, Quebec”.. I am sure that the last piece of news will be telecast in French in Quebec but even after 17 individual lessons with my French tutor (who finally fled the town to get away from me), I won’t even try to translate it because I know by the time I am done with the translation, it will come out something like Chinchoo Hwang Zhang was spotted to break the wind at 125 kilometers/hour. I digress. 

Coming back to Thanksgiving (has started to feel like a Hindi movie with so many flashbacks), we did have our traditional Thanksgiving meal Thursday evening, which involved a variety of Indian dishes (come on, Desis in the US have their own “traditional” Thanksgiving food) plus a beautiful vegetarian turkey my friend “P” made with tremendous creativity (picture below is worth a thousand words). And please note that no animals were hurt in the preparation of our Thanksgiving meal.

Then, in order to continue the 9-year old tradition, my friend “S”, my wife Anshu, and I got to the outlet mall at around 10 PM for some Black Friday (rather Thursday) shopping. As much as we had to drive around to find the parking, we still made sure that we parked in the mall’s parking lot because last year we parked at the apartment complex across the mall and when we returned to our car at 3 AM, it gave us a big surprise by not being there…it had been towed. The experience of getting it back caused some mental scars which we did not want to repeat this year.

Every store had a huge crowd in the front because they were letting only a certain number of shoppers to get in at any given time. We joined the line for The North Face outlet store. This was a long, convoluted line with people waiting patiently in the freezing temperatures.  It was moving very slow and after moving 3 feet in 15 minutes, I was becoming impatient.  So I said to the guy next to me, “This store better have tons of good deals”.  He laughed and said, “Come on, you cannot expect “deals” at Starbucks. In fact, I think they should open more Starbucks in this mall.”  “What?” I screamed.  Turned out that we were not standing in the store line but in the Starbucks line. 

And since we were already in the line and “S” and Anshu are huge coffee fans, we decided to wait in the line and get some coffee anyway. I am not a coffee drinker at all but given the sub-zero temperatures, I decided to get a Caramel Macchiato. When I told the barista my order, she asked, “what size?”  I looked at the board. It showed: Tall (12 oz): $4.65, Grande (16 oz): $5.15, Venti (20 oz): $5.90. I said, “I am not a big coffee drinker. So can I get a difference between a Grande and a Tall? It will be 4 oz and I will pay you $0.50 (for arithmetically-challenged readers, it is the difference between $5.15 and $4.65)?” Needless to say, I had to stay without a coffee the whole night. So much for the arbitrage and an efficient market theory I was taught at the business school.

The next day was dedicated for our friends A&D, who drove a long distance to come and meet us at S&P’s home. A&D were blessed with their first child last year and are still getting used to trials and tribulations of raising a drooling but cute bundle of joy so making fun of them will be insensitive, inappropriate (and I am sure unconstitutional as well).

We also spent a memorable couple of days with our friends R&H, who have 2 lovely daughters (12 and 8). In the evening, we had to go to the mall to pick up something at the Apple store but there was a long wait so I was assigned the job of keeping their 2 daughters, a 12-year old friend of the elder daughter and my 7-year-old son Kush busy in the mall while the rest of the clan waited at the Apple store. This is when these two 12-year old girls came up with a brilliant idea to do some store-hopping (equivalent to bar-hopping but at a much higher speed and with much less fun for me). Now, in my ideal world, I try to stay away from the mall as much as possible but I still accompany Anshu during some “sane” shopping trips...nothing like what I experienced that fateful evening. We went from one clothing store to another, where these 2 girls “oohed” and “awwwed” at every single girl clothing item.

I saw many shoppers smiling at my misery and it was still ok until the trip culminated at the ultimate teenage girl’s store – Claire’s.  That was the last straw. I had never set foot in a Claire’s store before that day but I was extremely thankful for the surplus of Y-chromosomes in my family (grew up with 2 brothers and now have 2 sons). No wonder God kept me away from the pleasure of having a daughter because I think I would have been a clueless dad of a daughter.  As with every traumatic experience, my pain from the store-hopping will heal away with time (a weekly therapy session with my shrink will help too) but I am sure some mental scars will stay for a long time.

On a serious note, thanks S&P, R&H, and A&D for your gracious hospitality and a fun-filled super long weekend. We had a blast!!

And a final thought: Armor and humor both deflect pain but, obviously, it will idiotic to wear full body armor in these peaceful times.