Thanksgiving--Chocolate, ice picks, and terror-filled freeways

Unlike many of my fellow boomers, I still have a bright, lively mom, and I now live close enough to her to drive to her house for Thanksgiving--even though it takes 2 hours of sheer terror on the L.A. freeways to get there. I'm praying and invoking the gods of several religions right now, because I'm leaving in about an hour.

I'm taking her a little box of chocolate covered dates from the date farm a few miles from my house here in Indio. Well, it's the date farm store, anyway. The date trees are gone, having been sacrificed to the never-ending march of the suburbs into agricultural land. I would complain about this, but I realize I'm a big part of the problem. The new home my parents moved into in 1951 in Lakewood CA (where I am bound today--Mom still lives there) was built on farm land. "Volunteer" tomato plants showed up in the yard for years after we moved in. A house I moved to in Irvine CA in the 1980s still had asparagus fields next to it. My home in Bothell WA was built on a former cow pasture, with some of the original shade trees in the neighborhood park.

But who knew date palms in a desert whose temperatures sometimes reach 120 degrees F. would be endangered by the voracious appetite for new homes? The Shields Date Store is still at the old location, on the old highway, for people like me who like to grab a bit of history before it disappears forever (because we keep building our homes over it!) The box says "Indio," so I suspect there are still some date groves around here, somewhere.

I bought some fabulous strawberries at a local farmer's market, and decided they, too, should be enrobed in chocolate and taken to my mom, who adores chocolate almost as much as I do. It was not until I was in the process of melting chocolate, preparatory to dipping them and laying them on a cookie sheet, that I realized: 1) the counter spaces in my new kitchen are broken up into such small surfaces I couldn't lay out all my ingredients in one place, 2) my side-by-side refrigerator doesn't have a big enough space for a cookie sheet, 3) I have no waxed paper, 4), I have no cooking spray. I put the chocolate dipped strawberries directly on a plate. Not the smartest thing to do. They look pretty good on the plate, but half of the chocolate stays behind when you try to pick up the strawberry. (Sigh.) I'll just have to put an ice pick next to the plate, the way you put a pie server next to a pie plate. ("It's fun--try it!...The band-aids are in the drawer...")

OK, I've procrastinated as long as I can. Time to put strawberries, dates, overnight bag, and little dog in car. When I worked in sales, they taught us to wiggle our toes and take a deep breath before entering an office on a cold call. Somehow, it got your circulation going and your courage up. I think I'll get in the car, wiggle my toes, pump my fist in the air and holler, "Look out, Suckers, here I come!" That should get me ready for the maze of 10-lane freeways full of crazed holiday seekers. If not, I'll just white-knuckle it, as usual.

I hope your Thanksgiving is just as interesting as mine promises to be (minus the ice-pick, of course!)