A Thanksgiving Tale: Feivel Goes South

Here's the whole story. Feivel wanted to go out late on Thanksgiving morning. His Oma told him he could walk to the Brookville Market, 1/2 mile right down the road (no turns, no major roads to cross, etc) to buy her some paper napkins she needed, and that he could buy himself a candy bar with the change. He headed out and came back 5 minutes later saying he couldn't find the store. We told him he hadn't gone far enough; he knows right where the store is; we've walked there with him in the past and he's been there plenty of times. So he headed back out.

An hour and a half later, he hadn't returned. I walked up to the shops, checking the side streets and so on. The clerk had seen him come and buy the napkins and 3 candies by about 11:30, just when he should have arrived. No one at any of the other shops had seen him. No one coming from the other direction had seen him.

We drove the rest of the way down the road to Chevy Chase Circle. We went around the circle, down 1/2 mile of CT Ave in DC, and back up CT Ave in MD. No Feivel. At that point we called the police.

They had 10 units, and a regular K9 unit out searching and picked up his pillowcases for the K9 bloodhound unit search when he finally called 5 hours after setting out. He had indeed gotten lost, had gone the wrong way when he came out of the store, gone all the way to the other end of the road by the Circle, turned away from CT Ave (where he would have found shops and shoppers galore, and which was visible from where he came out at the end of the road) and instead headed down Western Ave into the residential area of Chevy Chase, DC. He just kept walking until finally he gave up and asked a nice lady out for a walk for help because he was lost. She told him no problem, people got lost all the time in their neighborhood, but she had no idea he was the object of such a big police search and was as lost as he was! He asked her to help him find his grandparents' phone number and knew their full names, so she was able to call 411 and get the number quickly; he was so good he even told her he wasn't allowed to enter a stranger's house so he stayed outside and she brought the cordless phone out. He called us, the police went right there to stay with him until we arrived, and we flew right out to get him.

So that was that. He was home just in time for Thanksgiving dinner (he needed to rest and relax for a while before he was ready to eat; he was scared, tired, and cold), and we had a Feivel to be extra thankful for.

And just for a more typical update, here's Addie in her Thanksgiving dress:

A hat I just finished knitting to mail off for a "Hats for Homeless Teens" drive:

And some yarn I finally spun this month after buying and dyeing the fleece last winter when I was in North Carolina at the John C. Campbell Folk School: