A Christmas to remember, or to forget

Have you ever had one of those trips in which it seemed that every move you made was cursed? I have.

My initial plan for Christmas and New Years was to spend some time with Fiend the weekend before Christmas, then drive down to the Ozarks for the family Christmas get-together on the 23rd and onward to Texas for a week, and back to Michigan following New Years.

Fortunately, most of the weekend with Fiend was not affected by the curse that afflicted my later travels. As she noted in her blog, we had all sorts of fun adventures. Some of them were delightful, like seeing the musical comedy that indirectly inspired the movie You've Got Mail and browsing the rambling used bookstores that make A-town such a pleasurable and dangerous place for bibliophiles. Others, like having the front grille of my car bashed in by a nitwit driver who blithely sailed past a stop sign into multiple lanes of oncoming traffic on a through street, were not so delightful. Fortunately, no one was hurt, although the other two cars involved were totalled. The Pontiac's front grille and headlights were damaged. (Note: If one plans to be involved in a low-to-moderate-speed collision, plan on driving a twenty-year-old full-size family sedan with heavy steel bumpers and a full-length steel frame.)

Still, on the whole, I couldn't ask for better company for such adventures, delightful or no.

It was after Fiend left that the curse manifested itself in all its gruesome strength. I contemplated driving to Missouri in the damaged car, but reports on the 22nd and 23rd of record-breaking blizzards in Indiana, Illinois, and Ohio; of interstate highways closed due to snow and roadside motels packed with stranded travellers sleeping in the hallways, dissuaded me from doing so. Thinking quickly for once, I informed family in Missouri that I wouldn't get to visit them for Christmas this year, took the Pontiac to a local body shop, bought an air ticket to Texas for the New Year weekend, and made plans to meet up with family and friends in Texas during the reduced time available to me. Problem solved!

Or so one would think. One would think wrong.

Unfortunately, my air itinerary had me making connections through the Little Rock airport. This, as I found out, is not a good idea. The airport staff there are evidently unaccustomed to people making connections through their fair city. This means that they are unaccustomed to such niceties as transferring baggage from incoming to outgoing flights. Which, in turn, means that I arrived in Dallas-Fort Worth, but my luggage, with all but a few of the family's Christmas presents, did not. It was not until the middle of the next day that the airline finally got around to delivering them. Fly the Friendly Skies, indeed. The flight attendant who expressed amazement at the very idea of connecting to another flight in Little Rock had the right idea.

In the meanwhile, Pablo and Carlos picked me up from the airport and, following long-established tradition, we went out for exotic food, a raid on a secondhand bookstore, and a snooty foreign movie. Unfortunately, the Inwood, the chosen site of past revels, was closed for renovation, so we had to settle for the Angelika Theater.

Oh, I'm sorry. I said Theater, but it's not a theater at all. It's the Angelika Film Center, which is much more prestigious than a mere theater. Sorry for the confusion.

Either way, A Very Long Engagement was worth seeing. It's a bit too romantic to be a war movie, and far too graphically bloody to be a traditional romance. This means that one can not fall back on the comfortable expectations of cliched movie genres. The central question of the plot -- whether the heroine's fiancee did or did not survive the War -- remains unresolved and could go either way right up until the end of the film. Although there are a few moments when it seems that leading lady Audrey Tautou's performance is reminiscent of the gamine Amelie, the sheer brutality of the trench warfare depicted in the film, and the amoral inhumanity of those who exercise power over human life and death with no thought for the consequences of their actions, counterbalances her perkiness and perseverance with a very real and very cold sense of bureaucratic evil at work. If I were to venture a highfalutin' metaphor, I'd say that the continual push-and-pull between her persistent love for her fiancee and the military's callous disregard for humanity is an instance of the perpetual battle between those who love life and those who love death.

The "neighborhood" around the Angelika looks like a planned experiment in upscale New Urbanism, with narrow brick-paved streets winding between two-and-three-story buildings housing restaurants or trendy shops (shoppes?) on the first floor and (presumably pricy) apartments above. Curious, but a bit too new and synthetic and self-consciously trendy to appeal to crusty old cynics like myself. Give it a few decades to accumulate grime and non-standard, non-committee-approved building alterations, and I might reconsider. Having lived in a small downtown area that actually supplied most of what a person would need, including affordable housing, within a space of a few blocks, without central or artificial planning, I am not easily impressed by consciously planned imitations.

New Year's Eve became a substitute Christmas with parents, brother, and sister-in-law in Austin, Texas. Spent the rest of the vacation visiting Pablo's new/old house, getting my butt kicked at Settlers of Catan, and rummaging through the long-stored remnants of my pre-Michigan life in a storage compartment, trying to find a few useful pieces of it that I could mail back to myself in Y-town.

The trip back didn't go any more smoothly than the trip down. (Remember that curse?) American Eagle changed their departure gate twice at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport, took off almost an hour late, and arrived in Little Rock fifteen minutes before the scheduled departure time of my connecting flight. I elbowed my way down the aisle of the airplane and sprinted the length of the Little Rock terminal only to find a "cancelled" sign hanging on the Northwest departure gate and no Northwest personnel in sight. After wandering around for an hour or so trying to find someone from Northwest, I was eventually able to rebook passage on a later flight. They didn't lose the luggage this time, and it only took them two hours to unload it from the aircraft in Detroit. And so home again. And it only took 15 hours!

Notable Christmas swag:

Return of the King extended edition DVD. (Thank you!)
Nifty socket-wrench set specially designed for work in close quarters like car engines (in case I ever have time to do my own mechanic work)
Fancy coffee
Various books, including a couple of books about the Louvre's art and architecture, Literary Feuds, and Dungeon, Fire and Sword : the Knights Templar in the Crusades.
Scented candle
Various cat toys, including a battery-powered mouse that scares human beings and amuses felines.
Heavy insulated gloves
Pilgrim in the Ruins : a life of Walker Percy