This year also marks the second annual vegan Thanksgiving hosted by none other than my socially conscious sister. Following her efforts to spin attention away from the bloody implications of the Thanksgiving holidays, I decided to RSVP to the Thanksgiving dinner hosted by my friends A and M featuring none other than a Turtle Islands Foods (C) Tofurkey complete with all the trimmings of a Tofurkey Roast (made with organic non-genetically engineered soybeans), Eight Cranberry Apple Potato Dumplings, Tofurkey Giblet & Mushroom Gravy (yes the giblets do refer to soy substitutes of Turkey liver and gizzards), herbed brown and tofurkey wild rice stuffing, and tofurky jurky WishstixTM. Enthused by the prospect of a vegetarian friendly Thanksgiving feast, I decided to go balls to the wall in Thanksgiving revelry. I planned a tentative agenda of Thanksgiving grocery shopping and cooking on Wednesday, the annual Macy's Thanksgiving day parade and Thanksgiving dinner on Thursday, and Black Friday shopping at Macy's.Eager to beat the crazy crowds associated with grocery stores on Thanksgiving eve, my friend M picked me up immediately after school on Wednesday, hoping to take advantage of the educator's early 3 pm end of the official workday. Thanks to traffic, we arrived at the 125th street Pathmark at approximately 4 pm. Armed with creaky, dysfunctional shopping cart (the last one available at the store), we joined the foray of the overstocked supermarket.
Now despite the popular depiction of New York as an overcrowded, claustrophobic nightmare, I rarely encounter this New York. I am relatively adroit in avoiding the hot spots such as Times Square and the Financial District, but on occasion one gets trapped in a veritable madhouse. This evening was just such an occasion. Unable to navigate through the narrow aisles, teeming with overly anxious Thanksgiving shoppers, M and I, joined recently by our friend A found a stakeout point for the cart and went our separate ways down the aisles for our groceries. No longer encumbered by the creaking cart, whose noise level was matched only by the hundreds of screaming and whining children, I found it much easier to find the ingredients necessary for my share of the cooking. When I reached the front of the baking aisle, I was confronted by the horrific scene of over one hundred full shopping carts nestled with no rhyme or reason into the checkout lanes like alligators circling their submerged prey.
Chagrined at my ineptitude for initially assessing the situation, I ran back to M and instructed her to wait in line with the cart, while A and I finished shopping. In the end, we emerged from the insane crowds relatively unscathed. I incurred a minor abrasion on my Achilles from a senile woman in a wheelchair, intent on using her motorized advantage to barrel through the crowds yelling "excuse me," despite my insistence that there was nowhere for me to go to get out of her way. Fleeing the scene with the creaky cart, the war wound on my heel, and most of the groceries necessary for the feast, I wondered; was there not a more efficient way of organizing the crowd? Or at the very least, allowing the crowd to organize itself?
The following day my friend G and I got up early to secure places along the park to view the Thanksgiving parade. Again, I found myself in the rare insanely packed crowd of people. Although we arrived only about 15 minutes before the beginning of the parade, we were able to slip in to the thick of things. We must have come at the watershed moment of crowd arrival, because as soon as we found ourselves in a suitable viewing point, we were met with pressure from behind. I literally felt open palms on my upper back guiding me forward and to the front accompanied by a plea, "I need to get my son and I to the front of that building." I saw the fuitility in pointing out to him that he was certainly not the only person trying to navigate through the crowds, and decided to remain silent, and tacitly mock him to my friend. I looked to my right, presumably the pushers destination, and saw a bottleneck, where the crowd was so packed that there was only a tiny entrance for passage.
Again "Excuse me, I need to get through!" Another push.
I decided to respond verbally this time, "You know, it is still rude to push a perfect stranger, even if you say excuse me." This drew a chuckle from the crowd, including a woman to our immediate left, sitting with her family amongst the packed in crowd, not at all unlike a can of sardines, on nothing other than four lawn chairs and a cooler. She explained to me that she had arrived three hours earlier to stake out this spot for her family. Hence the lawnchairs. Confident the that crowd would open up a little bit when her family arrived and the lawnchairs folded up, I smiled and said nothing.
Again, "Excuse me! I need to get through." I gave up trying to give this man a lesson in ettiquete and moved to the side, while heaving a sigh.
At this point, G and I were met with the familiar face of a woman, P, who goes to church with us. She gave a chuckle and regailed us with her theories of crowd mentalities. "You know, the reason these crowds get so crazy is that nobody has spatial intelligence."
"Oh," replied G, intrigued, "What's that."
"Well, nobody here understands how to get through the crowd, or where the optimal places to stand are," she said referencing the line of impatient people behind us, led blindly by the pushy man towards the bottleneck. "It's ten times worse in there. I was in there before, but I got out. I found my friends here, and its a much better view. Nobody in there has the spatial intelligence to notice that they won't be able to see the parade, much less breathe." Intrigued by her epistemic take on the situation, I mused on her theory momentarily before seeing her carted away by her friends towards the crazy bottleneck she had referenced as a spatially unintelligent place to be not a minute earlier. With a smile, a shrug, and an ironic laugh she disappeared behind the melange of eager faces.
At this point, the lawn chairlady's (LCL) family was arriving. Hoping that this would open up the crowd a little bit, G and I positioned ourselves to close off a little space for our friends who were supposed to arrive soon. However, rather than folding up her chairs to make room for the new arrivals, LCL shoved them into the tightly packed area and stood up on the chairs. Now able to see the beginnings of the parade, and now annoyed not only at our newly obstucted view, but at the blatantly inconsiderate act of taking up about 3 square feet to stand amongst the tightly packed crowd, G and I left the LCL vicinity for a less packed area. Clearly, positioning ourselves next to LCL was spatially imprudent.
At this point, G and I were generally pessimistic about our chances of an unobstructed view of the parade with our friends. Children were going up on Daddys' shoulders like weeds among a rose bed, and we could hear only heightened frustration from the bottleneck-bound crowd from behind. One lady in particular had a conniption fit when denied entrance, "You have to move aside! There are elderly people back here! You have to let people through!" When this drew nothing but laughs from the crowd, the woman heightened her pleas. At this point LCL's family, now aware of how inconsiderate her roost was, hinted that she should get down. "I came to see a parade," was all she replied laconically.
Our friends finally arrived. Much to our delight, our friends stood in stark contrast to the crowd as spatially intelligent beings. Rather than trying to barrel through all at once, they came in one by one, able to courteously move through the crowd until they reached us. J, the last to arrive, and the most spatially intelligent of us all hung back. Self conscious of his height, J did not want to obstruct the view of the people who had so graciously let the rest of them through. J and I eventually devised the solution of having him stand down on the curb, where his extra height would be offset by the decline in elevation.
Overall, we found the experience to be quite pleasant. Once we were all standing together in a relatively unobstructed area, we were able to enjoy the parade. Some highlights of the parade included Dolly Parton, Sesame Street (the real characters, not the balloon), Jordin Sparks, and the casts of Spring Awakening and Hairspray. However, the harrowing experience did take the rest of the day to recover from. Even after a wonderful meal (except for the tofurkey which ended up being the only inedible entry of the night), a Packer victory, several fun games, and a viewing of Home Alone on TNT, I felt unprepared to face the spatially unintelligent crowds for a third day in a row at the Macy's Black Friday sale.
Instead, I found refuge in Central Park playing Ultimate Frisbee. In my opinion, the most spatially intelligent thing one can do is to avoid the spatially unintelligent en masse in the first place. Happy Thanksgiving!
