My dad’s a good lad or hiking, unless it rains. Then he pulls the plug. He told me yesterday, he’d seen the forecast. He was no longer interested. Let’s pick it up next week. I’ve been up since a call I had at two in the morning. Another call began at four thirty. Before the third, decidedly less stressful call was to begin at seven I noticed it wasn’t raining. There were clouds, the forecast was certainly wet, but as soon as I got in the car to take my daughter to school I asked him and he offered to meet me on the west side of the Walkway Over the Hudson, which would be on my way home.
We got very lucky this morning. Menacing clouds for as far we could see but not a drop of rain as we promenaded across the mighty Hudson and over to Poughkeepsie. Something peculiar happens with shale slabs on the west anchor of the trail. They seem to have shed scales and created an inexplicable reptilian surface. I see one and then a few chestnut oaks with their long, saw-toothed leaves and I pointed them out to my dad, as we’d only just been talking about how we’d only otherwise seen this tree way up at the top of the ridge in the traps. Some time I’m going to transplant a sapling to my yard.
The colors were extraordinary. Impossible pairings of green and yellow and orange off into the hills that make up Fanny Reece Park. We admire the houses down below that have such fine views of the fjord and then we laugh as my wife, for one, would want every shutter drawn with so many people walking by all the time. I’ve lived for more than a few years of my life within a pedestrian view of a major bridge. I didn’t mind at the time. Looking down at the old Italian section of Poughkeepsie I considered my maternal grandmother once again, who had to walk to school through that section of town. And she apparently held her nose, repulsed by the smell of garlic, when she did.
Later in the day I try to get some chores done in town. I need to mail a letter to Hong Kong. One gets the impression that there aren’t many things mailed overseas from our local post office. The lady is well intentioned, but she seems to be regularly overruled by the gent beside her who contradicts her and suggests, for example that tracking numbers are indeed still available, when a package goes overseas. I return my cross-country skis and request a new, easier type of binding for this year’s rental. But they have no other binding and I’m made to feel that the problem is all mine. I rent them nonetheless. At the dry cleaner, where I am taking two coats, and two sweaters I learn that it is a cool thirty-five dollars a-piece to dry clean a coat. I headed out to buy a whole chicken to bake and a sweet and sour sauce to concoct at home but Tops didn’t have any whole chickens. They guy even checked in the back. And I impulse bought a jar of Jamaican Jerk Chicken sauce and bought three breasts to bake back home instead.
Friday, 10/16/20
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