Ignoring the Experts on Thanksgiving

Expert advice for Thanksgiving was to stay home. But I've been ignoring most experts' health advice for ten years and enjoyed good health for it; we'll see in a few weeks if this latest decision was sublime or ridiculous. I drove 300 miles to Cleveland. I hugged my cousin and finally met her husband. I ate food I shouldn't have. The three of us went to restaurants and attractions. We didn't do anything ridiculous or illegal--we all wore masks in public places and none of us were sick. Nobody I encountered seemed ill and nobody formed a crowd. I hung out with people for the first time in almost a year, relaxed and slept nine hours a night. It was health food for the soul and I'd do it again.

Sublime? Ridiculous? It can be hard to tell. Photo from Amazon.

The day before I left, I made vegetarian collards from the garden and low-carb pumpkin pie. My cousin is a vegetarian, but she cooks meat for me when I'm there and I bring vegetarian food when I visit. I also whipped my house into shape for the dog sitter. I'm not a slob, but the house gets a better cleaning when company is coming. I wonder how many other houses in 2020 need a good cleaning.

My cousin's mother-in-law stayed home, being in a high-risk category. Meanwhile, the three of us had dinner and went to an Irish pub and a Greek restaurant for lunch Friday and Saturday. We went to the West Side Market, too, where they sell rare foods: chicken feet, rabbit, a hundred Chinese spices and sauces, and fruits I'd never seen. I bought some gyro meat.

We went sightseeing. The Ohio State Reformatory was partly refurbished, remarkably beautiful for a prison, and awfully sunny for a building that's supposed to be haunted. The Flats on the Cuyahoga River were nearly finished, and the aquarium nearby at the old power house was a marvelous place to be mesmerized by fish, stingrays and other animals. The Christmas Story gift shop sold me some postcards with the infamous leg lamp. I skipped the tour--I live in a vintagey old house and didn't need to see another one.

We stopped at a gas station where some Amish people went inside. I asked my cousin and her husband if Amish people normally stopped for gas. No, they said, but enough of them got rides that someone they knew was a full-time Yoder toter.

I got a view of Ohio I didn't see on a leafy Memorial Day weekend when it looked like a big golf course. Late fall revealed enormous wonders of civil engineering in Cleveland, lots of smaller unfinished works (I assume they're not digging up patches of dirt for fun), houses in close quarters with a lot of decorations and well-worn furniture in the yards, and a lot of beautiful architecture. Ohio will look great when it's done.

My employer, a CPA firm, encouraged us to consider working from home for a few weeks if we did something like visit people we don't live with. My supervisor thought my trip wasn't a concern. I wonder how many experts really think such a trip would be.

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