We went upstate to spend a few days with Mr. P's family.

Fall in New England, it is undeniably Hudson River School territory:

Photo of New England valley

A Hudson River School painting

Mr. P's sister has three kids and the oldest, a boy, is on a soccer team. The first day we were there they had a game so we all went to watch.

I don't know much about sports and soccer especially, it came it little late to the Midwest. I grew up under the softball league school of predominant child sport, or if you were a real jock football and some tennis sprinkled in, maybe track or swimming. But soccer was still an exotic, vaguely upscale pursuit and I wasn't all the in tune with sports anyway. I mean I really know almost nothing about the rules of engagement, protocol, what have you. This became painfully obvious when I thought that the team his nephew was playing against was called "The Forks" because their jerseys said Forks on the front. I was thinking to myself what a weird, and somewhat charming, mascot choice that is, that maybe teams don't get a powerful, intimidating mascots like a tiger or fighting Spartan until they get to middle school, that Forks was a training wheel mascot. Oh but no, turns out Forks is where the opposing team were from, they did have some mascot like a panther or something. Mr. P's sister thought that was pretty funny.

The next day we all went over to his sister's house for dinner. Before dinner I was sitting on the couch talking to the kids. I decided to show them the pictures of the game the day before, then they started asking about New York City. So I started flipping through those pictures to show them. That's when I realized how not kid appropriate my day-to-day life really is. I had pictures of pickled, dissected things, pots made of human skulls, gigantic bugs, models of prehistoric animals shot in the most frightening ways possible, a picture of a crazy bum dressed as a fairy princess in Central Park, good times. The older kids were riveted, the younger had eyes the size of saucers.

So I'm sure those nightmares were topped only by those of the previous trip when we are were sitting around having a cookout and I was talking to Mr. P's brother-in-law about the prevalence of Great White shark attacks in our neck of the woods. About and how a week earlier a diver has his head bit off while collecting abalone and I realized that I had three little sets of unblinking eyes held in a mixture of lurid fascination and sheer horror. Yeah. Last Christmas Mr. P gave his nephew a kit where you use clay and a plastic skull to forensically recreate a Neanderthal head. The kids look forward to our visits, his sister maybe not so much.

Okay, since it was fall and it was New England we decided to go apple picking.

After we made apple cobbler and enough apple crisp to feed an army Mr. P decided to turn his artistic vision to the surplus.

Now, I grew up on Kitchen Witches. Maybe it was the Midwest, the '70s or just my family history but the proper thing to do with an apple is to carve a face in it, let it dry out and attached it to the soft stuffed body of a witch on a broom and hang it in a kitchen window for good luck. Mr. P had never heard of this but took to it like a fish to water. And testament to what the love for a child will do to you, Mr. P's mother let him hang potentially rotting fruit on her perfectly bug-free patio to dry out.

In order to get home we had to take a short flight from his parents' regional airport to NYC where we transferred to jet to take us back to San Francisco.

The flight to Kennedy was fine, we had room to stretch out since it was under booked. On the jet home, however, I was seated next to a woman I'll call Chanty. Chanty was around 40 or 50 years old I'd say with a big, round, happy face. Most definitely Tibetan and a very, very observant Buddhist.

The woman started chanting and rocking gently back and forth the second she sat down. As soon as she did settle into her seat she unzipped her enormous canvas duffel bag and started taking out all sorts of chant enhancing items; bowls, bells, necklace of sandalwood beads, Buddha, the works. She had a whole portable shrine set up on her lap by the time we were ready to take off.

She chanted for the next five and half hours with nary a stop to breath. She chanted until her mouth was so tired she started to slur her words. She chanted as Mr. P and I played travel Scrabble, she chanted as I watched "Chicago" on my seat back TV, she chanted through snacks and drinks, she chanted through attempts to nap, she only stopped chanting long enough to eat some sort of lentil stew she produced from the Duffel Bag of Surprises which filled the cabin with the smell of curry.

For the first two hours I was telling myself to be tolerant. By the third hour I was trying to decide how bad of a person it made me to try and communicate in sign language to shut up already. By hour four I was wishing I could open a hatch to toss her prayer flag wrapped body out of the plane without bringing us all down to a earth in a fiery crash. But I sat, patiently, and said nothing. I was feeling a little guilty about being annoyed until we were about to touch down and she pulled out a pink Razr to tell her ride in Oakland we were landing. Because if you can chat up your friends on the Paris Hilton of cell phones you can most definitely save the chanting till you get to the meditation center in Petaluma already.

It was an appropriate transition home to San Francisco.