What a difference a day made

24th November, 2005. First Thanksgiving in the years I've been here that I didn't have any real plans. So I accepted a Thanksgiving dinner invite to a colleague's place. I was touched that I was the only non-family member invited to the affair, and before I knew it seven hours had passed, I had enjoyed a lovely traditional Thanksgiving meal and answered every question about India the father had, made my first feline friend, spoken about topics as diverse as corruption in Mexico, a car called "The Brahmin", whether Einstein qualified as a sociable person or not, the origin of the word "OK" and the kind of wedding my hosts were planning to have. All in all, a very enjoyable evening.
Cut to today, "Black Friday". To save myself from myself, I decided to go to the mall in the afternoon when I hoped the crowds would have thinned down, and maybe spend an hour or two checking out the shopping...Boy, was I in for a surprise! It was 1:00 by the time I reached (having waited 20 minutes for the bus, unheard of in normal times...but the bus-driver apologized for the delay and blamed it on the traffic and advised us to get back by hook or crook because no buses would be on time today!!) The mall was as crowded as Crawford market! I was pushed and jostled around by enthusiastic (read 'desperate') shoppers. I was nauseated in about 15 minutes and I was back in my cozy apartment with a book by 2:45, probably the only person who actually went to a mall today and didn't buy a single thing!!
Some lessons learned from the last two days:
1. I know what they mean by lonely now...The holidays can be pretty depressing here if you're alone.
2. On the other hand, even a phone call, a dinner, a conversation with someone on the bus can relieve you of the feeling of being lonely, if only temporarily.
3. I was the only passenger on this one bus I took yesterday, and the bus-driver told me I was the only one all day (this was at 3:30 p.m.!) and we rode for about 20 minutes without sighting a single soul...not a car on the road, not a single person on the roads! Americans sure take their holdiay seriously!!
4. I passed by the mall yesterday on my way to dinner, and there was NOT A SINGLE CAR parked anywhere...it was then that I realized how large the parking lots were.
5. Today, there was NOT A SINGLE PARKING SPOT available in the same mall!!! People were honking and stalling, fighting and cussing at each other with their windows rolled down...If I saw a millionth of this energy yesterday, I would have felt less like a lonely loser yesterday on my bus ride.
As you can probably deduce, I have had nothing substantial to say or do, no bright sparks of inspiration striking in the recent past, so this post was just a way for me to note a few firsts for posterity - my first Thanksgiving dinner with an American family, my first (sort of) Black Friday shopping (well, sort of!) experience, my first holiday I've spent completely on my own, my first experience of contrasts so drastic and so shocking from one day to the next that I'm at once amazed and reassured. What a difference twenty four little hours indeed makes.
FYI...the title comes from a very sweet song by a very sweet Jamie Cullum who combines jazz and folk and a little angst in his album "Twenty-something". Jem and Jamie Cullum are my recommendations for some mellow wind-down music on a cold evening.