Before we took the in-laws back to the airport we visited Lonestar for lunch, where we had the waitress who tries hard to put every other waitstaff who’s tried to hard to shame. And she did. Everything was delicious and amazing, mostly because she loved it. And you’d have thought she’d been there three days after about 18 months out of work and just happy with the prospect of getting the bills paid and maybe a little take-home sirloin at the end of it all, but she said she’s been there a year.

So the orders come and go and the bread comes and then the lunch comes, because that’s the order of things. More bread is delivered. She visits the table to ask about the food, as all discerning waitstaff will do. She did it a little too fast, though, so I could only assume that my unrolling of the silverware was superlative in every way. She asked my father-in-law about his steak — as he was going to be traveling the bulk of the day lunch was key — and he was ready to emotionally invest himself in his potato, but now the question was just out there.

So he had to go to the steak. The waitress, meanwhile, did something maybe you aren’t supposed to do, I don’t know, but it seemed odd. She leaned both hands on the table, which felt wrong considering our food was now here. And she really wanted him to try his steak. Try the steak!

And for some reason all I could think of was “NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition! Amongst our weaponry are fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency, an almost fanatical devotion to steak!”

He obliged her and pronounced it delicious. She concurred, which just made you wonder about what was truly going on in the kitchen. She said it was the bone that made it good, which isn’t exactly true, but everything was so amazing and delicious and wonderful and the textures of everything was so perfectly green or yellow or whatever. She must have been on ecstasy. That’s what I’m going with. She needed more tables and less pills.

So we had lunch, the folks packed up and we set out for the airport at a time that would allow them the generally desired two hours of people watching on Terminal C. I missed how we arrived at this necessity, but someone back-timed it, allowed for the time zone and we had our jump off point. We missed it by eight minutes. And we still had to get gas and drive the necessary 99 miles to the airport.

We arrived at the airport precisely seven minutes behind schedule, my mother-in-law promising a summary of their travel segments in a post-flight report. The sign at security said 10-20 minutes, which was cutting into the people watching time. We stood and watched them sail without incident through the first part of the security theater. It seems that they both possess driver’s licenses that match the names on their boarding passes.

We turned and left the airport, dodging rain drops and trying to decide what to do now that it was raining and rush hour. There is a Trader Joe’s nearby. The Yankee said she could get some things, but the rain, and rush hour and I said I’d never been to Trader Joe’s, so that sealed the deal.

And amid the dusky rain and the finally coiffed and intensely decorated people of midtown I had my first Trader Joe’s experience. These are some of my notes.

Some things never change, no matter the store, no matter how high-end, culturally adaptable and politically fashionable the target audience. Every store, everywhere, occasionally gets a guy in camo cargo shorts and a white t-shirt. And, also, traffic jams full of people oblivious to everything around them. That sounds catty, but I found it to be a relief. Also, you might note in the background, unisex restrooms. That’s just a grocery store bridge too far:

Brand diminution. I’ve been here four minutes and already I’m not sure what store I’m in. The name seems to change with every vaguely international flavor. And the labeling is already slipping from the precious to the universally childlike. This is a fine enough place, but this box strikes me as the thing that will end up in all future image searches of “Graphic design in the 2000-teens.”

I don’t know about you, but my great-grandfather and his son after him ate these wafer snacks, they were usually pink or this mild orange color and looked a lot like this. It made me think of them and smile, and then wonder if they were feeding me natural vegetable cellulose as a child. And what of the unnatural vegetable cellulose? Don’t those guys have a union? Where are they?

I am now kicking myself for not spinning this container around to see exactly what it is made of. I know better, I know better, I know better. And the Trader Joe’s site isn’t helping either. Someone please go check this out and let me know.

The logical conclusion of the popularity of someecards.com:

A bit more from the line art characters that provide us with the retro-neo-post modern pop art ideals that so blithely inform our generation. Post-consumer content, a phrase surely designed to rip all of the joy out of the language, is a product made from from waste that’s been used by a consumer, disposed of, and diverted from landfills. Now go wipe your child’s face:

Game changer: Trader Joe’s bathroom tissue. Is it that the one guy has a passing Rooseveltian resemblance or that the other guy needs some of this stuff – and right now?

At least they take their cornbread seriously.

So Trader Joe’s, interesting packaging, clever names on many of the items. The vast majority of their inventory was marketed as their own product, which probably makes someone checking out at register three think there is actually a Joe somewhere, who perhaps engaged in some fair trade for post-consumer manure to fertilize his humble fields to bring this product to you. The biggest move away from the Trader Joe’s brand was on the beer and wine aisle.

I felt healthier just being there. We purchased several bags of things, none of the items pictured here, and The Yankee pronounced them as good deals. We shop smart like that, cherry picking all of the best products from the most economical places we can conveniently access. The airport tripped helped with that today.

And, then, of course, we waited out the better part of a meteorological deluge. The in-laws plane was delayed, and delayed again. There was a missing flight attendant, presumably whisked away to Oz. There was a search for another one. And also an inspection of their plane for hail damage, because that’s what you do when there is hail.

As we were about at the point of passing the airport to head for home the flight was canceled. We thought briefly we might be picking them up and taking them back home for the night. They found another flight, which was still somehow short a flight attendant. (Perhaps if they consolidated crews … )

This plane, much later, was also canceled for reasons that we haven’t learned. What was supposed to be an 8 p.m. arrival at their home airport began to look like spending a night in the Atlanta airport. We found this unacceptable. Two flights canceled underneath you, you are not struggling through an evening on Terminal C at Hartsfield. We will return to the airport!

This was politely refused.

OK, fine. We will book you a stay at an airport hotel. The Yankee did the reservations, coached them to the shuttle and they arrived there to find they’ll have a flight out first thing in the morning and the last room of the night.

That’s timing. This was all done, of course, by a series of phone calls and a few searches on an international network of computers and resolved in short order. A nice man in a large passenger van took them to a hotel they’d never heard of on a side of town they’d never visited and got them safely to a room. We did this from our house after a long stay at an all-natural, organic, feel-better-about-yourself grocery store, insulating our frozen purchases in a special bag made with space material and driving home, dodging trees felled by straight line winds in the relative comfort and safety of a marvelous piece of Japanese engineering that was assembled in the U.S. and Canada. It is an amazing world.

We celebrated with Chick-fil-A, which will let you order online from your particular store, but insists you call personally to obtain their hours, so we still have a way to go.

Oh, at Trader Joe’s we bought something called Cookie Butter. You should look into it. You’re welcome.