This year Aliyah’s brother and his wife, Josiah and Felicia, bought a house in Denver and to celebrate they offered to host Thanksgiving. Flying 3 hours with a 25 pound kicking baby is about five hundred times better than 6 hours of the same so we agreed, and because my parents and Aliyah’s parents will go wherever their grandchildren are we knew we’d see them too.
They day started off a little roughly - we missed our flight by about 4 minutes, briefly considered driving there (16 hours), and Yarden barfed up about a pound of string cheese into our cupped hands while we were waiting in line to re-book. But if you remain calm it turns out to be very easy to get on a standby flight, even on Thanksgiving, and showing handfuls of cheesy barf really seems to convince other people to hold your place in line, even on Thanksgiving. And on the upside our friend Elisabeth was on our new flight. On the downside someone had a cat on the flight, and my allergies made me nearly blind from breathing 3 hours of recycled cat air.
The flight itself was full but pretty uneventful other than a greater than usual amount of turbulence when landing, which made me think about Rosie Perez’s monologue in “Fearless” so I did my best to split the difference between holding Yarden tightly on my lap and squeezing her until she barfed another pound of cheese.
When we touched down I turned on my phone and surprisingly our house sitter Milwaukee Matt was calling at that exact moment. In the background I could hear the house alarm going off. I hadn’t given him the code, so I told it to him and thought that would be the end of it. Later we found out the following: (1) Aliyah’s phone was defective and needed to be replaced (2) The alarm company will try to call Aliyah if the alarm is triggered (3) If they don’t reach Aliyah, they call the police (4) Police response time on Thanksgiving is really good (5) Officers who have had their turkey dinners interrupted show up with guns drawn (6) Milwaukee Matt has a great sense of humor about being frisked (7) The City does not have a sense of humor about these things and will send you a bill for false alarms.
Felicia, Josiah and their son Jackson have a very nice place in suburban Denver , and they made a really great turkey dinner (and it’s not as easy as you might think find a kosher turkey in Denver ) and the night ended with Yarden and Jackson having a big splashing fight in the bath tub.
Next day we took a trip to Boulder . There is a promenade on Pearl Street . It was a little bit of a cat heard to try and get 8 adults and 2 toddlers all with various bladder strengths to all do the same thing. Eventually I just left everyone at a boulder-themed playground and found a specialty store offering a tasting of local wines. I did a flight of 4 for $3 and bought the last two bottles of chardonnay. We stopped for the world's smallest ice cream cones on the way back to Denver.
That night we left the kids with the grandparents and all the parents went out to bar called City Grill. They boast the best burgers in Denver , and they might be right but they were no Umami Burger. Josiah kicked ass in darts, I put some Def Leopard on the jukebox and discovered that my pool skills have not improved by not playing for 10 years, and Aliyah discovered she is a master table-top shuffleboard player.
The next morning my parents, Aliyah, Yarden and I met my cousin and godfather Mike Jr. for breakfast. He lives in the area, but he was in the middle of traveling around so he had to meet us on his way to the airport. It was really good to see him again. He has some work that may bring him to Pasadena next year, so hopefully we will also see him then.
All the men were going to get shaves and haircuts at a specialty barber’s, but they were booked so we went back to my parents’ hotel room to check them out. It was uneventful except for the opportunity to indulge one of Yarden’s constant wants: Ice.
I gave her a big hotel bucket full of ice in the middle of the floor and let her run amok. She’s mostly fascinated by how ice is cold, and her favorite game seemed to be freezing her hand and then warming it up in her mouth, or sometimes my mouth.
The rest of the day was spent preparing a large dinner. Aliyah had found a picture of tenderloin in GQ, and everyone agreed this would be a good plan. At the grocery store there was some confusion over the cut that we wanted so we showed them the picture from the magazine. That same page had the actual recipe on it, so it was kind of a problem later when we couldn’t find it again. Nobody knows where it went, but I suspect that Aliyah dropped it when she caught her hand in the car door. Josiah, being the great bother that he is, took off running for help and came back with about 2 pounds of crushed ice in a plastic shopping bag. Aliyah’s hand was okay, but we never saw the recipe page again and someone wound up buying another copy of the magazine later. Undeterred by possible further hand trauma, Aliyah got up the courage to use a food mandolin again (first time since she cut off the end of her finger 2+ years ago) and put together a sweet potato and leeks dish from memory.
Fortunately our old Simsbury friends the Feldcamps decided to come over and help us eat this enormous meal. They live a little west of Denver . My parents were staying with them that night so after dinner they gave Yarden a big hug and left. Yarden slept in the bed with Bubbie and Grandpa that night, which meant that Bubbie and Grandpa didn’t sleep much, but they still drove us to the airport. first thing in the morning. Yarden sang for us about “Apples and Bananas” and managed to get all the way to “G” in ”The Alphabet Song,” then we flew back to LA and got ready for Monday.
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