Should They Stay or Should They Go?

The arrangements were set, logged in airline computers or scrawled in mental calendars.

The Wrightens would spend Thanksgiving in Louisiana, finally attending a celebrated college football game with a clutch of seldom-seen, much-missed relatives.

The Tibbetses would return to Connecticut, introducing their 5-month-old daughter to her extended clan and to Thanksgiving rituals and recipes passed down for generations.

Then came Sept. 11, a poison cloud that blotted out tradition and left the two Southern California families and millions of other Americans contemplating Thanksgiving weekend, and flying, in entirely new ways.

The busiest travel week of the year arrives in 2001 with even the most seasoned fliers making new calculations. They inhale news about airports and airlines. They long for proof that safety has improved, but worry that it has not. They broker deals with themselves about when and how they will fly, then find circumstance or mood causing them to renegotiate.

For the Wrightens, the Tibbetses and so many others, the Thanksgiving of fondest imagination lies just a few days away. But for the last two months they have been asking: Is it worth it if you have to fly?

For years, Leroy Wrighten, 49, and his son, Jason, 23, watched the Bayou Classic on television the Saturday after Thanksgiving, wishing they could be there for the game between Grambling and Southern. The black universities’ gridiron matchup often is just the warmup for the spectacular show put on by their legendary marching bands.

“I’ve always said, ‘I want to take you to that,’ ” Leroy said of his son. “He’s lived in an integrated world, with me being in the military. I want him to see what the black colleges have to offer.”

In February, Jason, Leroy and his wife, Keleen, 38, decided this was the year to go. Piece by piece, they assembled an itinerary, part cultural pilgrimage, part family reunion.

They would leave their Lancaster home and fly from Los Angeles International Airport to Dallas to meet Leroy’s younger brother. “I haven’t spent Thanksgiving with him in about 30 years,” Leroy said. Then they would drive to Reston, La., for Thanksgiving dinner with Keleen’s baby sister, Lena. Finally, they would motor down to New Orleans for the game.

They had no qualms about traveling by air. Leroy and Keleen, now a sixth-grade teacher, had both served in the Air Force, though they met later. Leroy, now a civilian, works as an occupational safety specialist at Edwards Air Force Base.

Even LAX holds happy memories for them. Keleen flew in and out repeatedly when she lived in Chicago during their long-distance courtship. On one such visit, Leroy proposed to her across from United’s Terminal 7. He knelt down in the parking garage, right there on the first-floor concrete.

Sept. 11, however, made them examine every part of their festive plan anew.

Only Jason, usually the family’s most relaxed flier, became overtly fearful. “It just terrifies me,” he said in early October, contemplating the three-hour flight to Dallas.

Keleen, her high laugh ringing out in defiance, simply refused to let getting from here to there enter her mind. Instead, she and her sister called each other four or five times a day, talking about what to pack, what the weather would be like, what to wear to a Saturday night concert.

Dread and determination to stay the course mixed in Leroy to form a strange hybrid.

“If it was just a vacation, or if we hadn’t already purchased the tickets,” he said, “we probably wouldn’t fly.”

‘What if Something Happens?’

Daniel and Lorianne Tibbets’ Thanksgiving destination was a given. It was Daniel’s mother’s turn to host. The West Los Angeles couple just assumed they would join the two dozen siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins converging at her home in rural Riverton, Conn.

Two weeks after Sept. 11, their plans were abruptly upended. Don’t come, Joann Tibbets told her son and daughter-in-law. The family matriarch was annoyed--even a little angry--at her own decision. She counts on just a few visits a year and would miss seeing baby Grace, her only grandchild.

“Still,” Joann explained later, “I just would rather see them safe. I’d rather not be worrying, ‘What if something happens?’ . . . We’ll have other holidays.”

Thus commanded, Daniel and Lorianne turned Thanksgiving into an opportunity to articulate post-Sept. 11 rules about family travel.

“Anything short of a crisis, it’s not necessary,” said Lorianne, 27, a freelance television scriptwriter. “It’s not about whether we hurt someone’s feelings by not going somewhere. Safety is the priority.”

Daniel, 32, a top executive at the television division of a Canadian entertainment company, adopted a second set of guidelines for business, allowing flying for crucial meetings.

He canceled an early October trip to a conference in Paris, because most of the people he would have schmoozed with weren’t going either. “Not important enough,” he said firmly.

He let go of the Thanksgiving trip with little disappointment.

“It isn’t about being afraid,” Daniel said, a refrain repeated often. His hands moved over his dining room table in neat, parallel lines, measuring out new boundaries. “Just that some things are worth taking risks over and some aren’t.”

Calculating and Recalculating Risks

Risks. New ones bubble up in the Wrightens’ minds as their Thanksgiving dream junket inches closer.

When F-16 fighter jets escort a commercial plane back to LAX in early October, Leroy fixates on the possibility of friendly fire. A week later, it’s the cockpits. Are they safe? Have the airlines installed those new double doors?

“As long as no one gets in the cockpit, we’ll be all right,” he pronounces. “Keep the nuts out of the cockpits.”

As he searches for signs that the system is controlling the risks, his original plan seems in danger of unraveling. In mid-October, his brother cancels, claiming work obligations. Leroy suspects it’s a case of the jitters.

Son Jason circles Halloween on his calendar. If nothing plane-related happens by then, he says, perhaps his nerves will steady. Meanwhile, he daydreams about taking on terrorists at 33,000 feet, fighting imaginary battles against faceless men.

Keleen tries to kid her stepson out of his funk.

“You want me to hold your hand? I told you,” she says, playfully whacking his thigh, “I’ll hold your hand.”

But even for Keleen, doubts occasionally punch through her sunny calm.

Before leaving on a quick jaunt to Oakland to visit a sick friend, her first flight since Sept. 11, Keleen catches herself staring at Leroy as he drives her to the airport.

“He said, ‘You’re looking at me funny,’ ” Keleen explains later. “I said, ‘Well, I might not come back.’ ”

With all their anxiety focused on flight, danger of a more ordinary kind blindsides the Wrightens.

Early one morning in mid-October, as the family heads to Hollywood for a taping of “The Price Is Right,” a construction truck shoves their Nissan Altima into another car. An airbag deploys and metal crumples, but everyone is fine.

“It was like an earthquake. I had time to wish it would stop,” Leroy says. “It’s almost funny, when you think about all the stuff we’ve been talking about.”

Back to Normal, Bit by Bit

Funny how fast everything starts to feel normal again.

For the first month after the attacks, the Tibbetses are on high alert. They catch themselves stockpiling canned goods with each trip to the grocery store.

On the day of Daniel’s first post-Sept. 11 business trip, he makes sure his check for expanded life insurance coverage has gone through. Lorianne keeps a hawk’s eye on the television. She wants instant confirmation that he has landed safely in Toronto: “I told him, this time you call tonight.”

But by late October, their days are filled with regular concerns: a visit from the plumber for her, a stream of pitch meetings for him. They discuss how to fix the cracks that appear over their front door after their house is rattled by a small earthquake.

As weeks pass without further terrorist attacks and U.S. officials urge fliers to behave normally, their new air-travel rules sometimes feel too rigid, even knee-jerk.

“I feel guilty about feeling nervous about [flying],” Lorianne says. “I know I’m not supposed to be, but I am.”

Then Daniel learns he may have to fly for business during Thanksgiving week anyway, to Toronto and possibly to New York. Suddenly, it seems logical to meet his wife and young daughter on the East Coast for the holiday.

“You begin to wonder, ‘Heck, why shouldn’t we go back East?’ ” Daniel says. “Maybe today, we would choose differently. Maybe we would go.”

They check air fares, but stop short of buying. New parents in a newly terrorized world, their protective instincts trump everything.

“I wouldn’t mind if it were just me and him,” Lorianne says. “But Grace. . . . What if I was sitting there with her and something happened? I can’t even talk about it.”

On the wall behind Daniel’s desk hangs a poster for the original “King Kong” movie. In it, the giant ape is pulverizing a plane with his right paw, the New York skyline at his feet. Daniel sees it a thousand times a day, but every once in while, he really sees it.

“There’s a mist of something in between the everyday stuff,” Lorianne says. “Just when our guard drops they’re going to do it again. I just know it.”

Flight 587 Puts New Spin on Debate

Whatever ambivalence the Tibbetses had about not flying East for Thanksgiving evaporated when American Airlines Flight 587 crashed in Queens, New York, on Monday, killing 265 people.

“I feel we were justified,” Daniel says, after a day of rapid-fire phone calls from newly uneasy friends. “Everyone is second-guessing themselves. I’m glad our decision is already made.”

He and Lorianne have been swept up in planning another mammoth Thanksgiving feast, but this time with her relatives in Mission Viejo.

Two months after the Sept. 11 attacks, Lorianne and her sister-in-law head for the mall to do early Christmas shopping, divvying up Thanksgiving cooking assignments along the way. Stuffing, two kinds of dip, bacon casserole, plastic cups, Lorianne lists under her own name in her spiral notebook.

Daniel’s holiday-week business trip has been postponed until December, another load off their minds.

“I know I’m putting off the inevitable,” Lorianne says. “I know he eventually has to go, but at least I have a little longer before I have to meet it head-on.”

Not long after the attacks, the couple guessed it might take six months or more for them to approach flying as they had before. For a brief while, they felt ahead of schedule. The crash of Flight 587 shook their fragile confidence.

“I feel,” Lorianne says, “as if the clock has gone back to zero again.”

Breaking Big Fears Into Small Pieces

As the Wrightens’ departure date approaches, Leroy visualizes the process in smaller and smaller bits. He times out their journey to LAX, from front door to shuttle bus to terminal. The 2 p.m. Flyaway from Van Nuys--that’s the way to get to LAX on time, he decides.

He envisions himself at the carry-on screening station.

“I have no qualms about emptying every piece of my luggage,” he says. “I want people to know I’m traveling in a safe manner and I want to know that about everybody else. If I could check everybody on the flight, I would.”

An appeal from Leroy persuades his brother to re-up for the trip. But the American Airlines crash puts young Jason on the verge of defection again. Leroy refuses to give up on the Thanksgiving that was so many years in the making.

“I’m going to keep him talked into it,” he says. “I really want him to do this.”

Leroy shrugs off the Flight 587 disaster. An apparent mechanical failure seems an occasional inevitability. Keleen decides the same because she has Made Up Her Mind.

“I want to see my sister,” she says. “I want to go.”

So they are going. If they can just catch the 2 p.m. Van Nuys Flyaway, Leroy says.

“I don’t want to miss that plane.”