Thanks for the Blues

I HAVE TO ADMIT that it seemed like a good idea at first. I had never had the opportunity to go home for Thanksgiving before, and when my parents offered to pay for the trip, I immediately accepted.

I had not had any experience travelling over the Thanksgiving holiday, so when I made my reservation for a night flight on Wednesday, I took the travel agent's snickering as a sign of goodwill.

Thus, it was with complete innocence and naivete' that I stumbled into the chaos of the holiday travel nightmare.

The first indication that I had entered a dangerous game came on Wednesday afternoon. My grandmother had offered to give me a ride to Logan, and as we were driving along the lazy curves of Storrow Drive, something large and yellow flashed by us, nearly knocking us off the road in its roaring wake. When I dared to get out of the fetal position and opened my eyes, I realized the object was an old school bus. The next thing I realized was that our spedometer was lounging somewhere between 15 and 20.

"Stomp it, Gramma!" I cried, just in time for another volley of four-wheeled bullets to whisk by us.

"The speed limit is only 30 here," she began to explain, but was cut off by the deafening boom of a truck horn, which seemed to be located somewhere in our back seat. The fact that we could see nothing but an immense grille in our rear window persuaded my grandmother that speeding was synonymous with surviving, and she put the pedal to the metal.

There were relatively few terrifying traffic incidents after that, and by the time we arrived at the New York Air terminal, I had almost stopped shaking.

FROM THE MOMENT I walked up to the counter, I had a deceptively long streak of good luck. I managed to snag a seat on an earlier flight, and when I walked through security, I did not have my usual experience of tripping the metal detector ten times straight and drawing a crowd of police before someone decided the machine was broken. As if this wasn't good enough, the holiday rush only delayed my flight 30 minutes, and I had a window seat a good six rows away from the smoking section.

In fact, the only problem I had on the flight to LaGuardia was the girl sitting next to me, a short hairy creature with the most annoying laugh I have ever heard in my life, a dry croaking hiccup which made it sound as if she were trying to cough up a large and unwieldy insect. Unfortunately, she found her shorter, hairier traveling companion a source of boundless levity, and by the time we landed it was all I could do to keep from plunging my plastic cheese knife into her leg.

I guess things really started going wrong at LaGuardia. As soon as I had fought my way off of the plane, I asked my "customer service agent" for directions to the Piedmont terminal for my connection to Roanoke. Fifteen minutes later, standing in front of the female employee's bathroom, I decided I should try to find it on my own.

Whatever relief I felt at emerging from the enormous, unpleasant mass of humanity which clogged the airport and finding the right gate was lost when I saw what was going on. The travel agent's snickering thundered in my ears as I took my place in the longest line I had seen since "Porky's" opened in Roanoke.

I had been waiting perhaps twenty minutes before it was my turn to get a seating assignment. The man at the counter was just about to give me my little sticker when someone began beating the gate door with all his might.

My agent abandoned me and ran over to see what was wrong. Apparently, the man had secured a seat and a boarding pass for the recently departed Norfolk flight, and then totally missed the boarding call.

"Ain't nobody gettin' on no plane til I'm goin' to Norfolk!" He yelled, slamming his fist against the door.

"I'm sorry, but the plane's already in the air. Could you please move--"

"I had a seat!!"

"Didn't you hear your flight being called?"

"Yeah...but I had a seat!!"

"Why didn't you come?"

"I had just done put a quarter of my own money in the TV, and I wasn't gonna waste it. 'Sides, I wanted to see who won the Fiero, and I had--"

"Well, sir, I'm afraid--"

"I ain't never gonna fly People's again!!"

"But this is Piedmont, sir."

"I had a seat!!"

It degenerated after this point, and five minutes later security guards made the man leave the area.

By the time I finally got my seat, there were only three left on the plane. "It's in the smoking section, I'm afraid," the agent smiled, "but it's right next to the bathroom."

For the remaining 90 minutes to Roanoke, I found myself wedged between a man in a camouflage jacket and a Confederate "Forget hell!" hat who may well have been the Imperial Wizard, and another man who looked unnervingly like Charles Manson. When I wasn't choking on the fumes of the former's Camels, I was gagging in the acrid smoke of the latter's home-grown monstrosities.

BY THE TIME I stumbled off the plane in Roanoke, only two hours behind schedule, I was sick as a radioactive dog.

What followed was four days of fun and leisure, which I now realize was to prepare me for the ordeal of coming home.

I stepped back into the storm at 6:00 p.m. on Monday. My girlfriend, a sophomore at William and Mary, had given me a ride to Norfolk so I could catch a cheap People Express flight to Boston.

From the second we entered the terminal, I knew it wasn't going to be as cheap or easy as I'd hoped. My flight was not until 7:45, and the airport was packed. The edginess and hostility of the crowd was explained somewhat when we learned that the majority of these people were waiting for the 3:00 p.m. flight.

"I coulda walked to Jersey in this time," someone grumbled in front of us, and I looked up to see it was my friend from LaGuardia, perhaps thinking he was on Piedmont this time.

As it happened, I grumbled a little myself when I found that high winds and the "holiday crunch" prevented me from leaving Norfolk until 9:45. By the time I finally got on the plane, I needed and was looking forward to a nice, restful ride home.

From the moment the pilot welcomed us aboard, however, I knew I was in for trouble. He apologized for the delay in takeoff, blaming it on "dangerously high winds." He did reassure us, though, that as long as we kept our seatbelts fastened and read our emergency cards, there wasn't that much to worry about.

I was just beginning to relax and enjoy my drink when the plane lurched violently up and to the right, causing the man next to me to dump his Bloody Mary in my lap. I did not have time to scream or react in any way before the plane jerked down to the left, causing a stewardess to fall across the row of seats in front of me.

As I sat there in dumb terror, trying ineffectually to wipe vodka and tomato juice off my pants with an airsickness bag, the plane executed a series of dives and rolls that would have been difficult in a fighter plane, let alone a DC-10. To my great displeasure, I found my sentiments echoed loudly by a two-year old in the seat behind me, who let loose a bloodcurdling screech with every undulation of the plane. Eventually, the head steward clawed his way to the intercom and coughed to get our attention. I halfway expected him to begin showing us how to flap our arms, but instead he shakily welcomed us to Newark.

Newark never looked so good as it did when I stepped off the plane onto good old terra firma. There was not time to offer a sacrifice to whatever God had delivered me, so I hurried to the Boston gate. Luck was mine again, and an hour later, I was at Logan Airport waiting for my luggage.

IN FACT, 90 minutes later, I was waiting for my luggage. At 12:49, I realized it wasn't coming, and that I had 11 minutes to get to the MBTA.

Through, speed, daring, and indescribable rudeness, I made it onto the platform just in time. Heaving a sigh of relief, I sat down on the train, beaming at the passengers around me.

Everyone else seemed happy, too. One elderly gentleman, in fact, was grinning at me for all his worth.

"Nice jacket," he smiled, pointing at my mother's latest unsolicited Christmas gift.

"Oh, thanks," I said, trying to be polite.

"Nice pants, too."

"Thanks again," I replied, wondering vaguely if there were empty seats at the far end of the car.

"I love you."

This was my cue to get off at the next station and take a cab home.

It was almost 2:00 a.m. when I stumbled into the mass of paper, dirty socks, and filth that is my room, and for the first time in my life, I was glad to be back.

Maybe that's what Thanksgiving is all about, I thought just as I was going to sleep. You throw your life to the winds twice in five days, and by the time the ordeal is over, you are infinitely thankful to be back where you were when you started, and not fighting your way through a mass of elbows, or bouncing around at 10,000 feet, confessing your sins to the Rastafarian in the seat next to you. It makes you glad to be alive.