The kids' idea to stay up all night and see SS off to the airport at 6 o'clock on a Sunday morning amused me, but I figured I'd sneak out around 1 and get some sleep. Which seemed okay until I realized that it was already about 3 and I was sort of running interference between the honoree and his guests. T heyhad decided to hang out on the driveway instead of the dining room, where he was sort of hoping to play 42. I tried to be subtle about suggesting that at least some of them might go inside.
Once they drifted in in twos or threes to join him in dominoes (none of them seemed to know how to play 42 except the most annoying one in the bunch), they got the sillies and started reciting the scripts of favorite old movies—way too much fun for me to miss for a couple of hours of possible sleep. So I wound up staying up with them.
As 6 o'clock neared, I again urged SS to get his stuff together and into the truck so we could make our dawn adventure, and we all piled in. Since I was the only one who hadn't been drinking, I drove, and the rest of the crowd sorted themselves into the nooks and crannies left around SS's pile of travel goods.
We zipped the couple of miles to the airport, where everybody tumbled out of the van for hugs and good-byes in maybe the sweetest parting scene I've ever seen. SS took off for the door, and the rest of us piled back into the truck. I watched as he lugged his stuff up to the counter and started to check in, and the lump forming in my throat urged me to linger just a few minutes more until he headed to the security area. But the sleepy people in the truck, the cold ones in the back, and the growing line of traffic behind me told me I needed to move on.
I headed out of the airport and to the south to deliver the only person who wasn't planning to sleep at my house to his apartment. The trip took only a few minutes—nothing in our town takes many—so we were soon back at the house and ready to turn in for a few hours of rest.
And then the phone rang.
SS was on the other end, furious because he had been calling almost since we had pulled out of the loading zone and hadn't reached us. I didn't have pockets in the pants I was wearing, and I had left my cell phone at home. He had tried his sister, but she wasn't answering, either. (I don't know whether she had her phone with her or not; he thought it had a dead battery.)
His problem was urgent: the page of orders that would get him through customs in Germany was not with him, and he had to have it.
NOS answered the only corded phone in the house and got the word that SS needed the paper, which was supposed to be next to the tv in his room. DD was on it—up the stairs in record time—as I got the cordless phone to stay in communication with him, especially since the paper clearly wasn't there. SS had had me sorting through a stack of other papers in search of my updated power of attorney, and DD ripped through all of them in search of the orders. They simply weren't there.
I jumped into the first car on the driveway and roared back to the airport to get him to come and look for himself. If we found it quickly enough, we might—just might—still get him on the plane.
No such luck. He looked through the mess in the room until he finally realized that since it had been a bad photocopy to begin with and had been folded to fit into his pocket, he could easily have brushed it off into the trash with other papers. He grabbed the trashcan he had been using and dumped it over, to no avail. Hoping that the paper might still be in the outside trash can, he raced down the stairs and dumped it over. By some miracle, he had missed Thursday's trash collection: the orders were there.
But by now it was almost time for the plane to leave, and even though he had a ticket, we didn't have much hope of getting him aboard. If we didn't, we'd have to get him to the connecting flight—out of Dallas, which is about a 3-hour drive. Add in the couple of hours he might need to get through customs in a big airport, and we had only a couple of hours of leeway. We had to try.
DD insisted on going back to the local airport with us to see if she could help get him on the plane here, but to no avail; I suspect that the airline had called his name a time or two while they were loading the plane, but when he didn't respond, they gave his seat to somebody on standby. Our only recourse was a long drive on little sleep.
I had asked DD to give up her morning to make the drive with me, and she at first had grudgingly agreed to go. But she was right: this was supposed to be a vacation trip for her, she hadn't been feeling well for a couple of days, and she badly needed rest. She convinced NOS to go, but I really wanted him to stay around so that if the crowd started to wake up before I got back, he could supervise some rudimentary housekeeping.
SS and I were left with each other. His steel blue eyes are often playful, but when he is serious, they are firm. He argued logically: he had drunk less than anyone at the party except for me, and the morning's misadventures had been a huge wake-up call for him. He also had slept 6 hours later than me Saturday morning, and he had spent a year in Iraq as a driver for the military. He could drive to Dallas if I could handle the trip home.
Worst-case scenario, if I wasn't up to driving when we arrived, I have a sister in Dallas who would let me crash at her place. That wasn't a good plan for several reasons: this is the worst of all possible times for me not to be available to zip into the office, so driving back on a Monday morning wasn't at all optimal. And if I had to drive out of Dallas on a Sunday, I'd much prefer morning to night. And I've been getting emails from my sister lately that said she was miserable with seasonal crud, and I can't afford to get sick.
I grabbed my favorite cuddly blanket and changed from the pants without pockets to pants with, and we loaded into the car. SS grabbed a handful of cokes from the fridge, threw a stack of CDs into the back seat, and climbed behind the wheel. I laid the seat back as far as it would go and pulled the blanket up over my head to keep the sun out.
I don't have any idea how long I slept. I remember thinking I was awake for miles and miles, and I think I sensed when SS turned from the highway near our house to the one that would take us halfway to Dallas, but I don't remember slowing down for the first town, maybe 20 miles away. I roused up when he made a pit stop about an hour down the road, so he asked if I needed anything. I muttered something like " peanuts or something," and was pleased when he came back with cashews instead. I was just sure I'd know when he made the next highway interchange, but I suspect all I was sensing was a change of lanes or two.
When he pulled off after about another hour for another pit stop, I was ready to go in, too. I saw when we came out that he'd gotten himself an energy drink, so I don't know how well he was really holding up, but he seemed fine. In fact, he soon became downright chatty, and over the last 50 miles or so, we had a really nice visit. He doesn't have much experience at being the "honoree," so he didn't know how to respond to it, but his words on the last leg of the trip were all about how glad he was that he had sprung for the tickets and had had such very special people around him.
Gracie Garmin was no more help than the highway signs about getting us into the airport; for some reason she routed us to the north entrance, which wound back around to the south to get in, and we had no clue about which terminal we needed until we passed the toll booth on the way in. We arrived at about 11 for his 2:40 flight, leaving him enough time to check in, go through security, and hang out at the USO before he had to board the plane. Of course, we both realized at about the time we got to the airport that if he had left home without the orders, the USO might have been able to fix him up—but we both were glad we didn't have to rely on that.
He found the terminal, piled out, and grabbed his gear, and I moved over to the driver's seat. As soon as I texted the crowd at home that I was on my way back, I unwound my way out of the airport without problems except for my curiosity about why Gracie had steered us through Fort Worth to get there and through Dallas to get back. Except for a U-turn in Euless that made no sense to me, the trip was a pretty straight shot to US 20, and the rest of the road was a trail I had followed plenty of times before.
I made it back to the first northbound pit stop before I slowed down for gas, and I let the home crowd know I was about an hour away. They were all just starting to move and seemed pretty amazed that I was so close to home. A few minutes later, DD called to tell me they were about to leave for a bar where they could get food and watch football. Did I want to join them?
My knee-jerk said no, because I didn't need more junk food in my life and I wanted to go to bed. (Except for the sleep on the trip north, I had been up for more than 30 hours.) But on further consideration, I figured I could join them long enough to feed myself, and if I wanted to crash before they left, I'd have my car. I called back to find out where to meet them and joined them for a meal. One team won; the other lost in the last few seconds of play; and the food and the company were well worth the trip.
I managed to stay vertical long enough to watch in amazement as my house guests made a commendable stab at straightening up my house while DD made a perfunctory visit to her dad. When she got back, the whole group piled back into the pickup to attend a "house party" that turned out to be in the very house where I grew up.
I barely managed to get through a quick bath before I tucked myself in before 8 p.m., but I still resented the alarm when it finally dragged me out of bed at 7.
When I got to the office around noon, a single instant message popped up on my computer screen: safe in germany.
I finally could rest.
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