Aimee and I enjoyed a nice holiday weekend with her family in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New York, plus a little road trip detour through Connecticut on the way back home. The weekend started with a frantic last-minute effort to get the calendar done at work, which I think pretty much happened. I then caught the commuter rail for the first time, out to Aimee in Needham, feeling like a downtown 9-5’er heading out to the wife in the ‘burbs. We spent Wednesday evening with the Little Browns in Medway, which provided some great one-on-one time with Jack, who took the chance to show off his phenomenal Thomas the Tank Engine recall skills. He’s just starting to talk, and can definitely identify twenty or thirty different “Friends” of Thomas from their color and facial expression. It was pretty fun to hear him say “Toby! Clarabel! Darcy!” and all the other very British names for the various engines and machines. It all made me think of Shining Time Station, with Ringo Starr as “Mr. Condooktor,” who was then replaced by George Carlin, if I recall correctly…

We spent the next two days in Newport, where family and more re-convened for the official Thanksgiving dinner, an all-day affair which was a lot of fun and thankfully free of any fireworks. We also spent a little time wandering downtown Newport, window shopping and checking out prospective rehearsal dinner spots. What, pray tell, is the Protective Club? And how can I get a membership?



We also saw Ray at the local multiplex, which had its platter system visible from the lobby, convenient for my lesson on why it’s bad for film prints.

Saturday was spent in the lovely confines of Westchester County, near my old stomping ground in Greenwich. We attended the two-years-after-the-fact wedding reception of a cousin of Aimee’s, or the son of a cousin of Aimee’s mom, I should say, which still makes him a cousin, anyway. It was fun, if a little surreal, as I met a lot of Aimee’s relatives, who all seemed to know who I was, and who all kindly expressed their excitement at our upcoming nups. Needless to say, our reception will not be held in 2007, I hope.

After the party, the real adventure began, as we took what might be considered “the long way” back home, from Mt. Kisco to Cambridge via Litchfield, Connecticut. We didn’t have a whole lot of daylight left to enjoy the scenery with, but what we saw, we liked.



Our road atlas got less useful as we tried to use roads that were on the map but had no numbers, which coincided with the onset of darkness. We ended up doing the old family vacation movie trick of unwittingly driving in an actual circle, our hearts sinking as we recognized the uniquely-shaped church we’d driven by fifteen minutes before. We eventually made it to Litchfield, after miraculously popping out of the woods and onto a numbered road only a few miles away from our goal. I reminisced about my first trip to Litchfield in search of Carl Kallgren and his antique postcards, many of which I bought out of the shoe boxes in his garage in 1997. We dined at the delicious West Street Grill, and then headed back on the road home.

Of course, once I got home, I remembered the panorama picture frame Dad had left at my house this summer, which I’d planned to use for a collage of photo booth photos, and the fact that it had fallen on the floor and smashed into pieces on Wednesday morning. Oh well.