November 20, 2018

Dateline: Seattle, Washington-

Got up at the usual time this morning, through things out of the suitcase from the quick South Carolina trip and repacked it with some heavier clothes for the Pacific Northwest. I may need to make a trip to the mall for some long johns before the week is over as the weather report is now suggesting arctic air may descend on us by Thursday and I didn’t bring a lot of wool and down. I’ve lived in much more southerly latitudes the last thirty years and most of those items have long since left my wardrobe.

The trip, consisting of planes, trains, and automobiles, was uneventful. All the flights were on time. The luggage did not get lost (which has happened repeatedly on flights to Seattle in the past). The airports were not yet overly crowded. I knew there was a reason I flew on Monday rather than Wednesday. The biggest issue is the inching together of the seats in economy so that I now have to stick my knees up my nose in order to fit in my own little corner. I usually sit in the window seat so I don’t have to get up but with the contortions I now have to undergo, at the end of a five hour flight, my knees are incredibly sore and they may take a day or two to come back to their usual baseline.

They have finished the light rail from the airport into town. When the northern line is finished, I’ll be able to take it to within a block and a half of my father’s senior living facility, but it still dead ends at Husky stadium. My brother met me there and took me the last leg and we got to start catching up with each other. I spent a little time with my father, Alyn C Duxbury, then went over to my sister’s house to spend time with her, her boyfriend and her biological mother Jennifer Chapman. My sister was adopted, reunited with her birth parents twenty years or so ago and, in the manner that my family operates, they’ve been pulled into the family circle along with the rest of the motley crew and it’s always good to see them. I first met my sister Jeannie’s birth parents at her wedding in the summer of 1999. The marriage didn’t last, but the expanded family has.

I don’t think I’ve written a lot about my siblings. We love each other, we’re friends, but we’re all very different sorts of adults, each marching to a different drummer. I’m five years older than my sister and six years older than my brother so I was in a different generation of kid-dom from them and I was out of the house when they were in middle school. Of the three, I’m the academic, my sister the artist, and my brother the athlete although we cross pollinate in various ways. They also call me things that no one else in the family uses. My sister calls me Drew and my brother calls me Buzz. The origins of this come from when they were around four or five years old. They decided one day that it would be incredibly funny if Andrew became Androopy and, as they saw it irked ten year old me, they kept at it. My sister shortened it to Droopy which ultimately became the more normal Drew. My brother, the future English teacher, showed quite the way with etymology as he somehow changed Androopy to Buzzoopy which he ultimately shortened to Buzz. Neither one ever caught on beyond the sibling that created it.

Now, as my knees hurt, and I’ve been traveling all day, I’m going to sign off and find some bad television before falling asleep. More tomorrow.