Holidays in Tennessee

The kids table this year was reserved for my mother, her sister, and my two nephews, who are 7 and 4.  Normally, my mother would sit at the end of the dining room table, nearest the kitchen.  Which would facilitate getting up and down fifteen times — the cranberries, more rolls, more tea, sweet and unsweet, but who wants the unsweet anyway? — without making everyone else move around.  There was ham, potato salad, my family’s trademark cornbread and biscuit dressing, fruit salad, homemade cranberry sauce, grocery store rolls (which are the only kind you should ever eat, really) and, despite the sour faces from the four year-old, broccoli salad.  You know, the kind with the red onion and bacon and golden raisins, or dried cranberries if that’s what you have.

After, there was my mother’s sweet potato pie, and my gay uncle Foster’s red velvet cake, along with his world-famous cheesecake.  He’s not really my uncle, at least by blood.  Foster was originally my dad’s roommate in college, and he has been a friend of my family ever since — actually, he is part of our family.  I think of him as my uncle more than I do my actual uncles.  His red velvet cake is nearly Paula Deen’s recipe, though he changed it a bit so as to “not have to admit that I made anything that came from that woman.”  Is what he said.  His cheesecake is, hands-down, the best in the whole world.  He’s famous for it.  I don’t know whose recipe he’s using, or what he does that makes it so fucking beautiful and perfect, but it’s like that every time and it’s marvelous.  I didn’t get a picture of it — it vanished quickly.

Later we went on a walk through the woods.  Behind the new Volkswagon plant in Chattanooga, they have created the Enterprise South Nature Park, which used to be part of the Volunteer Army Ammunition Plant, and is now about 2,800 acres of trails and trees, for bikes, horses, people and so forth.  My nephews were perplexed by a sign that said “Stop for Wildlife” at the beginning of the trail, thinking that meant they should stop and look for the wildlife that was certainly visible from that point, at that moment.  On the preserve, there are 100 concrete magazines, which, at the time, housed TNT.  They are scattered in a roundabout, suburb-like pattern, and look at bit like something out of Lost.  We only made it to Number 1, before the boys got a bit bored and tired and were itching to move on to something else.  Here’s a cool map of the park.

The flight home was speedy, almost effortless.  It’s amazing how smoothly things can go when things go smoothly.  You can be in Atlanta (after driving there from Chattanooga) at 2:00pm and be home on the couch with your cats at 5:30pm.  The lady checking my bag and going through those motions started out with “Who told you my lane was open?”  It was supposed to be a joke, and me, thinking I had done the wrong thing, apologized, and then she felt bad — at least I think this is how the interaction went — and gave me a coupon for a free cocktail.  I asked the flight attendant what was good, she said “The Woodford is good.”  So that’s what I had.

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