This is for all the people I never got around to wishing happy-holiday-merry-xmas to in December. I didn’t get very far in the alphabet in my email directory and even less in my snail-mail roster. Next year I’ll start at zed.

I’m a W, usually among the last to be acknowledged. Once only, on a trip to China, I think it was in Xian and we were waiting for a plane to take us to (I’ll have to look it up). The little airport was way out of the city and there were no facilities like food, coffee, not even a lounge. There were no other people, just our group, waiting for one small (formerly Russian ) plane. We were going to be divided for two runs. I was bracing myself for the delay when our guide made a sudden decision: he reversed the order. He let the M-to-Z people on first. The A-to-M people would have to wait. They didn’t know how long that would be.

It was a short run, I remember. We arrived at our hotel room in plenty of time for dinner in the dining room. We had Mongolian Hot Pot at a special table designed for it. I had cooked Hot Pot before, but had never had it in China. I persuaded others to join me to make up the seating at the table (with a hot pot embedded in it ). We had a relaxed, leisurely, delicious, long dinner and only as we were leaving, we reaiized that the other half of our group had not yet shown up. And they didn’t, not for several hours after the dining room had closed.

It seems that the plane crew, on their return from taking us, were hungry and took a dinner break. But there were no facilities available in that remote little airport so they left and drove back into the city to eat and then returned hours later to deliver the rest of their (hungry) passengers to their destination.

That’s the only time in my life that I profited by being at the end of the alphabet. This year I will reverse the order of names in my directory and go backwards into this new year.

It’s about time.