Road Trip Rigors | Fort Bend Focus Magazine

Me when Mr. Kaminski’s early am talking just won’t stop.

By Patti Parish-Kaminski, Publisher

In the Kaminski household, Thanksgiving now means a trek out west. And I’m really good with that. I love the idea of going someplace where there are actual seasons, so I’m on board. However, the actual getting there does have its pitfalls.

Mr. Kaminski likes to drive west. I’m really okay with that as well, except for this early morning thing. Now I can get myself in the appointed mode of transportation with all necessary accoutrements at the pre-determined time – no issue there. But here’s the rub: Mr. Kaminski talks in the morning – a lot. It doesn’t matter if it’s 5 am. If he’s up, he’s talking – incessantly.

Your girl is not a morning person. I can be productive on the daily at a solid 9:30 am. Anything before that is simply static, white noise that is meaningless and annoying. And, he wants to tell me random things like, “Remind me to see how many stations we actually receive on Hulu.” Really? How that is possibly relevant to my pre-Diet Coke world at the crack of dawn?

I constantly have to remind him to give me some space until minimum 9:30ish on our rare pre-dawn jaunts. It appears that he has no recall of the past 27 years of my utter disdain for early am hours. Granted we do not spend a great deal of time together in the dawn of time hours – not even in bed – because he’s up and out and about, and I’m getting my beauty sleep. Add to the mix this year Mother traveling with us, and you’ll never believe this: she’s an early am talker as well.

The only saving grace on this trip is that by the time we crossed over into New Mexico, my Diet Coke actually kicked in dropping my aggravation level significantly. Good thing for Mr. Kaminski because the incessant chatter about cotton, wind farms and other irrelevant random topics was giving me dark thoughts. I feel certain if I had to actually inflict bodily harm to get Mr. Kaminski in a quiet time-out I could have gotten away with it in Texas. After all, Texas doesn’t tolerate much nonsense. Texans would feel my pain and excuse any drastic measures. New Mexico I’m not so sure about. My only hope there would be to claim an alien abduction should drastic measures be necessary.

Going home I think I’ll return to my modus operandi on early morning travels, which is to get in the truck and promptly go back to sleep. That way when 9:30 am arrives, I can wake up refreshed, victorious and ready to face the day without violence, aggravation or ideas, and I don’t mean positive ones.

Fortunately, we arrived at our Thanksgiving destination without incident – just one more thing to be thankful for. And the weather was a glorious 50 degrees with skies that never end. So, I guess a wee bit of aggravation was worth the outcome – kind of like preparing Thanksgiving dinner. Erma Bombeck said, “Thanksgiving dinners take eighteen hours to prepare. They are consumed in twelve minutes. Half-times take twelve minutes. This is not coincidence.”

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! See y’all next week – on the porch!

Patti Parish-Kaminski