For our family on Thanksgiving day all roads lead to Amherst, Ohio,
For us the ride from Columbus to Amherst, a town in northern Ohio about an hour west of Cleveland, feels as much a part of the Thanksgiving Day ritual as the meal itself. Seems we're always on the look-out along the way for the same peculiar or distinctive houses or Amish farms or examples of American-byzantine architecture in the small towns we pass through.
This year we broke with our from-time-immemorial Thanksgiving pilgrimage ritual of stopping along the way at the Goasis,
Before leaving I went up to the counter,
It never ceases to amaze me how nice and friendly food service folks always are. Even those who were working at this McDonald's on Thanksgiving day were cheerful, and the girl who took my order informed me that the soft drinks were all the same price, a dollar, whatever the size, and so suggested that I might want to get a larger size since I would pay no more than for a smaller.
I thought: 1) That was very nice of that girl, who, though she had to be there working on the holiday was still nice enough to tell me about the soft drink deal, and 2) It was somehow heartening to learn that a corporate entity in offering all sizes of drinks for a dollar had perhaps taken a nano-step back from striving to wring every conceivable cent out of every conceivable transaction.
Anyway, I left that McDonald's feeling a warm sense of gratitude for small things.
And so we arrived at the our destination to join those of our clan who could make it, all of us so happy to see each other again,