Inappropriately Enjoying the Panorama

 

I greatly enjoy the Seek app, though sometimes the app identifies things that make you second guess.  After countless attempts to identify the flowering tree at the bottom of our driveway, the app finally suggested it was a “Chinese Quince.”  This seemed fine, but last week it identified a bush with no resemblance to our crabapple-like tree, as the same Chinese Quince.  They can’t both be right.  This morning the error was obvious.  Pedaling south I saw what might have been a big, wasp’s nest but was, in fact a rotund barred owl who was turned and viewed me as I went beneath him and stopped to take a photo.  The Seek app was well intentioned and suggested I’d found a two-toed-sloth. 

Our morning drive to school routine, usually involves, me asking my little one if she wants to throw on tunes as we head up the driveway.   No one speeding around towards us from the blind curve to the left and I swung out on 208, surprised to hear the opening of “She’s So Heavy” suddenly coming from the car speakers.  Ecstatic that she chose it without any prompting, I turned it up.

 

She suggested she’d put it on somewhat randomly from a Beatles mix she has on her phone that is apparently entitled ‘baba music.’  I’ll take it.  “Ahh, you see, John who had all the ladies screaming for him, really wanted Yoko and she wasn’t so sure.”  “You know, when I was first considering this song, I took it literally and thought, ‘gee, she must really be overweight.’”  “Ahh. Listen to how screams out on this one.  It just comes from the depths of his belly.”

 

I cherry picked other tunes I wanted to hear from ‘Abbey Road’, considering the bass line and the double entendre title of “Come Together” as we sailed through Lloyd and enjoying a celestial listening to of “Because” as we sailed over the Mid-Hudson Bridge, me inappropriately enjoying the panorama at fifty miles an hour, in that tight traffic.  I couldn’t have been happier then when I reached Oakwood and dropped her off for the morning. 

We’ve now to drive all the way back up to Oneonta to get our second shot today.  I’ll drive the way up but I’m gonna take a nap on the return trip home. 

Friday 4/23/21

Of Travel Are Spun

 

We’re gonna have our second vaccine shot this week.  The kids will have theirs early next month.  And with that we may still pose a risk to the non-vaccinated but, barring evolutionary variants and off-chance extremes of bad luck, we should be beyond the clutches of the virus.  Musing on this general theme my mind goes, inevitably back to the well-decorated room in my mind that’s been vacant for nearly two years now, where fantasies of travel are spun and cultivated. 

The practical thing would be to head back to China. The topic of wistful conversation at every other dinner we’ve had this year, my younger one is terribly homesick.  Everyone is, on some level.  We haven’t seen our son, their brother and his wife for the longest stretch we’ve ever endured.  I have plenty of business I could attend to and people and practical matters aside we all want to eat lots of Chinese food, over and over and over again. 

And, the motherland doesn’t seem to be impressed, at this point, with our U.S. vaccine, any more than the U.S. is with the Sinovac variety.  And even I they were, we’d still need to sit out the first two weeks in a state mandated hotel and who knows what, (probably nothing) would await us when we return back home.  China remains impractical, I tell myself, till at least the Fall.  Though I’m pretty sure that’s what I told myself last fall, as well. 

 

The Caribbean however, seems more welcoming.  And while I had considered placating the girls with a few days in some resort somewhere, perhaps Martinique where the younger one could practice French, she countered that we should go from island to island on a boat.  Now that’s a great idea.  I spoke with a colleague who hails from Martinique and he suggested that such a thing could be done for not much money.  I bought the Lonely Planet Caribbean and today it came.  We’d better go in June or forget about it till Thanksgiving if we don’t want to hit the dreaded Hurricane season.  All the remarkable islands of the Eastern Caribbean that I’ve taught students from St. Vincent and had colleagues from, Barbados could be visited one-by-one with little three hour sails from one island to the next.  My wife wasn’t enthusiastic, until I told her that the little one had thought of it.  She had to chew on it for a while, once that was made clear. 

 

 

 

Thursday 4/22/21

A Refreshing Detour From

A reasonably healthy addiction, as habits go, I impulse buy books, far more readily here in the U.S. than I ever did back in China.  Amazon’s the culprit.  For a while you could order Penguin Classics and the like, on Amazon.cn.  But recently, when I thought to send such a book to a friend in Beijing it proved impossible.  The two worlds draw further apart, dangerously. 

 

A friend shared the link of a CUNY professor who was an expert on “Das Kapital.” I’ve never read it.  Have you?  It was always touted as unbelievably long and though it does seem to expand beyond two thousand pages, I’ve surmounted steeper things.  The cover of the Penguin Classics (that series again) Volume I is ominous scene from Adolph Von Menzel’s “The Forge” and I suggested to my friend that we should read it together, knowing that while he’d be intrigued his joining me for the journey was unlikely. 

 

It was sitting there by my bed stand and I read the first few pages of the introduction, before dozing off to sleep for a nap this afternoon.  Later, when I was back up, and on a call I drew reference to 'Das Kapital', apropos of nothing, with a colleague, in Beijing.  He hadn’t read it either, but he suggested his tastes erred on the side of Peter Kropotkin, which stopped me in my tracks.  Prince Kropotkin was and remains one of my greatest heroes. 

And we talked about “Mutual Aid’ and his critique of Social Darwinism.  I told him about my adult reread of “Memories of a Revolutionist” a few summers back on the Trans-Siberian Railroad, considering the Amur River and Kropotkin’s own visit to the Siberia as a geologist in the mid nineteenth century.  I even dug up the photos I’d taken at his prison cell in St. Peter and Paul’s Prison, there in Saint Petersburg.   What a refreshing detour from whatever else it was we had intended to discuss.  I don’t think I’ll ever consider him the same way again. 

 

 

 

Wednesday, 4/21/21

 

 

 

Vacuity Is Dependent On

 

Man, is it really true?  The New York Times has an article today that I didn’t really want to read.  Fortunately, I can still remember it.  If I keep on the way I’m doing, this article suggests, I may not be able to do so for long.  The inescapably accusatory title of the article was: “Sleeping Too Little in Middle Age May Increase Dementia Risk, Study Finds.”   Guilty, certainly. 

 

I went to bed at 11:00PM.  I was back up at 4:30AM.  I fall asleep early, generally and get up a bit earlier than I would naturally.  And if necessary, I take a nap during the day.  But this article was suggesting that none of this mattered.  Naps wouldn’t suffice to keep off the dreaded Al.  The body needs more than mere naps afford.  Reading about the profile, it seemed there was a bullseye between my droopy, tired shoulders.

Is it safe to assume I’m in the clear, just because my parents all have their faculties?  Rather, my propensity to incur the wrath of this vile vacuity is dependent on the one thing I seem better able then most people, to play fast and loose with.  I don’t mind getting up early.  When it’s time to sleep, my body will not be deterred and I’m pulled to somnambulance, mid-sentence. Early's fine and that's fortuitous.  This allows me to run a "global" business easily enough from New York.  But these are some pretty steep taxes to consider coming due in the next decade or two. 

Up and cogent just now, till the wee-hours and normally I’d be happy about the fact that sleep hadn’t claimed me yet.  I need to rise achingly early, tomorrow, Wednesday, which I can do, but now my actions have me nervous and resentful.  Grumpy, grouchy, and yes, sleepy and I want to push back on all the people I committed to speaking with, thinking about the inescapability of that article.  And as my medieval ancestors might have placed their faith in an icon or some relic of the Savior, my salve, my lucky rabbit’s foot, is science.  Surely science, will discern a cure for this scourge, something we will be able to ingest.  It's that or better adapt to there only being twenty-four hours in a day. 

 

 

 

Tuesday, 4/20/21

 

Rainbow On My Desk

 

Shafts of sun, cutting through fat, wet clouds of grey, the fingers of light, splayed across horizon impossible long, fading into the Trapps, the space for light increasing now, yielding more commanding light and oddly darker shadows below, closer to the canopy before me, an unyielding progression of emotion as would only be fitting on the day that I turn fifty-five.  Presumably a good bit beyond the midpoint of this incarnation, it's been a fine day thus far.  The delicate wasp that has just landed on the pane of glass before me agrees, his mighty abdomen nodding and his inspects the glass and flies on. 

 

I avoid social media in the main, but I do have a much in need of an update profile on LinkedIn.  Indeed, this blog is connected there and everyone once-and-a-while I meet someone for the first time who has actually been here and had a look.  The LinkedIn algorithm has, it seems, notified 2000-plus people that I was born on this day and my, what an interesting trawl of familiar and intimate and unrecognizable, seemingly at random have reached out to wish me a fine day.  A pang of guilt, certainly, for I haven’t ticked the same notification and am reminded that I’ve missed nineteen-hundred-and-ninety-nine birthdays, a few a day, presumably, ever day. 

My wife and I headed out to Kelleco Nursery today.  She had wanted to venture over to Sabellico on the east side of the Hudson but I’d already made that trip once this morning,  After an all-out bike ride at my maximum capacity to get it done in under forty-five minutes and two scheduled calls that I told myself where the last I’d do today, I returned with no photos cept a silly selfie and no new plants identified in a respectable thirty-six minutes, showered and shampooed, managed the two calls and officially declared myself, to myself to be done with work for the day.  I have to pause because that movement of light I’d referenced in the paragraph above is progressing on in manner most epic.  There’s even a small rainbow on my desk.  And after a tuna salad, which is only the second carnivorous meal I’ve had since early Jan, we headed out, listening as it were to Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs and made our way through the trees they had there at Kalleco, choosing two apple trees, one that bore red fruit and one that bore green.  I hope they keep the handy tags on them when they send them over.  Too big for our big SUV, they’re shipping them for a fee.  And, as one does, I asked and the fee is the fee, not matter how many trees you buy.  So we decided to buy two more.  Two stately gingko trees and the two apple trees will arrive on Thursday. 

 

In this fine, celestial moment of moving light I am enjoying some Trouble.  Her WFMU, TITMW show from last Thursday passed me by when it happened.  I’d thought to catch up with her all week but it’s only now I’m sitting down to savor.  She always starts with something gentle.  Something I am not familiar with, a feat I allow myself to consider reasonably impressive.  Do you know William Orbit and his number, “Adagio for Strings?” Good.  Me neither.  The Archie Schepp that follows is wonderfully familiar.  Soon, very soon if we’re not to be late, we’re off and up to Rhinebeck to dine with my mom and my stepdad at the lovely Sri Lankan joint Cinnamon.  My older one has presented me with a lovely oil painting of a male cardinal before a moody purple sky and the little one figured I could use a key lime pie and it’s a fine day to be born on.  Perhaps I’ll think of it when I pluck an apple from one of these trees, someday far off in the future, when this will all seem achingly precious and inaccessible. 

 

 

 

Monday, 04/19/21

Me A Sixth Generation

 

It’s my birthday over in China already.  I’ve still a bit of time here.  My intention today had been to dutifully keep up the tradition and go climb some mountain as a family today.  The peak was chosen.  I had the parking spot entered in my GPS.  It would be one or another restaurant after descending that we’d schlep into, sweaty and achy after returning.  Tough to make reservations.  But both the girls had gotten their first vaccines yesterday and both their arms were in pain.   I reread the reviews on climbing Mount Beacon, thirty minutes down river from here.  Everyone talked online about what a steep, exhausting climb it was and I unilaterally pulled the rip-chord two hours back.  Some other time. 

 

Earlier in the day I did something I’ve thought about for a while, which was to make a ton of corn muffins with a fistful of chia seeds tossed in for our new neighbors.  Two ladies, whom I assumed are a couple, moved in next door a few months back.  I’ve traded pleasantries up at the mailbox, or down on the driveway, but we’d never properly greeted them and Covid notwithstanding, it didn’t feel right.  So I extracted a dozen of the best end-products and threw them on a platter with a note and drove over to find them not at home.  Right.  I returned home, penned a come-and-get-em clause at the end of my note and left that instead of the baked goods which would have otherwise wound up in a groundhog’s belly if just left them on their stoop. 

In the catch-is-catch-can world of Covid vaccines, we’d originally booked a lot for these ladies next month all the way up in SUNY Binghamton, which promised to be a five hour round trip, but suddenly there were doses to be had in Po-town, across the river.  My little one’s high school helped us to sign up and we arrived in the Poughkeepsie High School parking lot, right on time at 3:30PM yesterday.  Good for Pougkeepsie and good-on all the fine people who were working there, helping to facilitate everything and to administer the shots.

 

My grandmother taught in this school system.  And though I’d lived in Poughkeepsie for three years and have driven around the town since I could first cogitate colors and wind, I had never seen the school and had certainly never been inside.  Were Poughkeepsie really the all-state basketball champions in 2019?  I thought about that, staring up at a banner.  “Girls Crew”  the road not traveled for my daughters.  That might have been interesting.  A young Hispanic girl with her mom, two or three African American families, a hard-hat guy with his wife and me, a sixth generation Poughkeepsian who now lives across the river. 

 

And as we waited for the girls to sit out the obligatory fifteen-minute period to be sure they had no adverse reactions my wife and I concurred that we were all rather lucky to Donald J. Trump and his shambolic absence-of-any-plan-whatsoever plan had been definitively terminated.  Quietly we both considered the myriad ways it might be worse were that fool to still be around massaging himself at the nation’s expense.

 

 

 

Sunday, 04/18/21

Like a Math Problem

 

A Christmas whim, spawned from hikes up in the Gunks with my dad last fall: why not get the girls rock climbing lessons?  A long shot, certainly but I’m no stranger to parenting Hail-Mary’s that were caught and spiked in the end zone.  So just before the pot-latch frenzy of the season was complete last December I dropped a gratuitous sum with Alpine Endeavors, hoping not only that the girls would reluctantly acquiesce but that the random weekend I chose in April wouldn’t rain either. 

 

It did.  But the folks at Alpine Endeavors (AE) were reasonable.  They called us ahead of time and suggested we reschedule.  They had even found me a female instructor, Jennifer who had children my own daughter’s age.  This sounded preferable to some wild-eyed male enthusiast, with the demeanor of a football coach.  “Climb harder!"  "Reach for it, damn it!"    AE wrote me last night to say that Jennifer might not be available, which was depressing.  I resisted the urge to complain though, and let it play out.  This morning I got the note that we were on with Jennifer and across, up to the Gunks a fine looking day was taking shape.

Poor Jennifer asked my daughter’s, with innocent brio, “How are you feeling about today?  Are you excited?”  The older one said: “Well?”  The younger one grunted.  It’s important to be honest, certainly, and though they weren’t exactly ‘psyched’ they had each other and Jennifer had a nice touch, I noticed, as she suited them up with a harness, helmets and hiking slippers.  We listened to the soundtrack to “A Hard Day’s Night” on the drive up to the Peter’s Kill parking lot, with everyone singing along to “I Should Have Known Better” which seemed to take the edge off. 

Well, as it turns out Jenn was masterful and they were so incredibly brave.  I had somehow imagined that I’d drop them off and return, but after a long wait just to get into the parking lot it was clear that I should probably stay, and why not, as it is astoundingly beautiful there, beneath the cliffs, amidst the pitch pines, but for the fact that I had a call at ten thirty with a good friend in Tel Aviv, whom I’d already cancelled on, once before.  But things would have to wrong some other day.  Remarkably I had coverage, did my call, which went well and as it ended I looked back to see my little one nearly at the top of the cliff face.  Up they went, and down them came, musing aloud that each move was like a math problem and that the solitude and degree of concentration it took, progressing up was unique. 

 

 

 

Saturday, 04/17/21

 

 

On to Saint Vincent

 

My younger daughter is back to on-campus learning.  This will take a bit of unlearning.  Friday morning routines for me mean calls in the wee-hours and then a calmness welcoming the dawn and the freedom from obligation that comes with the end of the business day in China and the beginning of Friday here in New York.  This morning though, I just returned to bed after the last of these calls, somewhere around five.  Two hours later I heard someone clumping around and jumped up.  “What are you doing up so late?” I called, downstairs to the laundry room at what I expected was my older one.  “Um, getting ready for school . . .”  Ah yes. 

Our old routine, last fall was a fine one.  I grumbled in the early days, about ‘chauffeuring’ her school, where there was a school bus at-the-ready.  Eventually though I came to cherish the time as a daily check-in, she could play tunes, I could play tunes.  If you look back at the entries from those dates, you’ll see we tried to do a daily progression through Korean history.  Today she caught me off guard and threw on Abbey Road and it was all I could do not to jump up and down and air-bass along with “Come Together.”  Listening to the timeless harmonies on “Because” was celestial, driving across the Mid-Hudson Bridge. 

 

And on the way home I called my best buddy over there in Beijing.  It was his eight in the evening and it rang but no one picked up.  He’d a been a fine one to talk Beatles with.  Left to myself for the ride home I soon had side three of the “White Album” on as loud as the car would go, marveling at Ringo’s muscular drumming on “Birthday” and crying uncontrollably, as if on-queue when I tried to sing along with “Cry Baby Cry.”  Purified and exhausted I felt, finally driving back down our drive.

 

They little ones will have their first vaccine shots tomorrow.  We’ll get our second next week.  Dare I begin to think about that which has otherwise remained unthinkable:  a vacation?  Just a glance at that rarified light, on the drive over I’d suggested that we might perhaps consider the French-speaking island of Martinique and my daughter had asked, why don’t we take a boat around, (that’s a fine idea), and I threw open the door, the moment I got home.  I’ve a new colleague-cum chum in Spain who hails from Martinique.  He had quickly shared with me photos of boats one could rent for $1500 per week that looked remarkable.  The distance from Martinque to Saint Lucia is only twenty miles and then on to St. Vincent yet again another twenty.  “How long does it take to sail such a distance?” I asked my friend.   Well you could travel from island to island and in many cases country to country in a matter of hours, there in the Eastern Caribbean.  I began imagining a trip off-season, perhaps August time frame and then I then I remembered things like Hurricanes.  Still, we could never have considered the Caribbean sitting in Beijing.  Lot’s of places to consider with the aperture altered. 

Friday, 04/16/21

A Tongue for Tea

I was the one to go and pick the little one up from the dentist today.  Before she can get braces, she’ll had to have her teeth cleaned and of course they found some cavities.  I waited in the lobby till the nurse showed us back in to consult with the dentist who introduced herself as Dr. “Sung” (sp?) and before she had spoken three words, I was sure she was Korean.  My daughter, who is studying Korean for fun, sat there listening.  After learning about the beastly holes she intended to fill there was a pause and I asked her where she was from, confirming that she hailed from Seoul, confirming as well that there was no good Korean food within miles of where we lived, but it was only then, that my daughter piped up and spoke to her in Korean, which appropriately caught the Doc off guard.  I asked her later why she hadn’t engaged her earlier on and apparently the woman checked the teeth, and left rather abruptly. 

She’s reading excerpts of Plato’s “Republic” for her eleventh grade philosophy class.  I think I was around that age when I’d tried to read it for myself and for some reason I remember being intimidated, finding it impenetrable.  I went out and got myself a copy to read along with her and was surprised   to find out how approachable the conversation al tone was.  Socrates leads the young, largely compliant group of friends on a discussion to build an ideal society from scratch.

 

Today had a call with that teacher whom I hadn’t met before.  A nice gentleman, he was sitting in front of a shelves of books, the same as me.  We’d traded a few notes beforehand and I’d shared with him the chapter by David Keightley I’d read recently, comparing Mycenean Greece with Shang China: why were the funerary sites in China so much more rich than those in Greece?  Why did the Greeks mythologize about patricide when the Chinese idealized filial piety?  I asked him and he said he had been to China once, for a conference on philosophy and though he’d gone hoping to discuss Chinese thinkers, everyone there wanted to talk about the western work he already knew well.   And when I asked him if he’d been to Greece he shared an unfortunate tale of a dream trip with the family that was cancelled at the last minute due to Covid. 

 

It’s the penultimate day of the weekly fast and the light is in site at the end of the tunnel.  Tomorrow we have a pizza Friday, and I can almost taste it.  Black coffee all day long, which doesn’t taste very good, no matter how warm it is in the afternoon.  The last time we’d gone to a Chinese market I’d picked up a pack of tieguanyin tea and I prepared a little pot for myself today.  My once-upon-a-time go-to tea, living in China, not so much because it tasted so good.  I don’t have much of a tongue for tea, and probably would fail a blindfold test to distinguish it from pu’er tea, but rather because the name in English “Iron Buddha.”

 

 

 

Thursday, 04/15/21

It From Pu Er

 

I was the one to go and pick the little one up from the dentist today.  Before she can get braces, she’ll had to have her teeth cleaned and of course they found some cavities.  I waited in the lobby till the nurse showed us back in to consult with the dentist who introduced herself as Dr. “Sung” and before she had spoken three words, I was sure she was Korean.  My daughter, who is studying Korean for fun, sat there listening.  After learning about the beastly holes she intended to fill there was a pause and I asked her where she was from, confirming that she hailed from Seoul, confirming as well that there was no good Korean food within miles of where we lived, but it was only then, that my daughter piped up and spoke to her in Korean, which appropriately caught the Doc off guard.  I asked her later why she hadn’t engaged the doctor earlier on and apparently the lady had checked the teeth, and then left rather abruptly. 

 

My daughter's reading excerpts of Plato’s “Republic” for her eleventh grade philosophy class.  I think I was around that age when I’d tried to read it for myself and for some reason I recall being intimidated, finding it impenetrable.  I went out and got myself a copy to read along with her and was surprised   to find out how approachable the conversation al tone was.  Socrates leads the young, largely compliant group of friends on a discussion to build an ideal society from scratch.

Today had a call with that teacher whom I hadn’t met before.  A nice gentleman, he was sitting in front of a shelves of books, the same as me.  We’d traded a few notes beforehand and I’d shared with him the chapter by David Keightley I’d read recently, comparing Mycenean Greece with Shang China: why were the funerary sites in China so much more rich than those in Greece?  Why did the Greeks mythologize about patricide when the Chinese idealized filial piety?  I asked him and he said he had been to China once, for a conference on philosophy and though he’d gone hoping to discuss Chinese thinkers, everyone there wanted to talk about the western work he already knew well.   And when I asked him if he’d been to Greece he shared an unfortunate tale of a dream trip with the family that was cancelled at the last minute due to Covid. 

 

It’s the penultimate day of the weekly fast and the light is in site at the end of the tunnel.  Tomorrow we have a pizza Friday, and I can almost taste it.  Black coffee all day long, which doesn’t taste very good, no matter how warm it is in the afternoon.  The last time we’d gone to a Chinese market I’d picked up a pack of tieguanyin tea and I prepared a little pot for myself today.  My once-upon-a-time go-to tea, living in China, not so much because it tasted so good.  I don’t have much of a tongue for tea, and probably would fail a blindfold test to distinguish it from pu’er tea, but rather because the name in English is something you can't forget: “Iron Buddha.”

 

 

 

Thursday, 04/15/21

Tone Boots and Slacks

 

Last night my younger daughter mentioned she needed to do a report on ‘direct action.’  Independently, she mentioned she wanted to look at the Taiping Rebellion.  It would certainly fit the bill, but when I learned more about the assignment, and the request for primary sources, I suggested she consider the Cultural Revolution, or June 4^th or the US bombing of the Chinese embassy in Yugoslavia and the aftermath in Beijing as she could talk to people for whom it was a living memory.  She decided to have a look at the protests in Tiananmen Square and as we talked it over, I showed her pieces from the documentary made not long after: “The Gate of Heavenly Peace.”  It makes for extremely disturbing viewing.

 

She talked to her mom, as well, who knew people on both sides of that conflict.  Servicemen called for unsavory duty and other who left at that time, who had never returned, indeed who could no longer return.  And she surprised me this morning when she mentioned that she was no longer sure about writing the paper, as it might be something that might somehow, someway prevent her, herself from being able to return to China.  I mastered my impulse to scream that the long arm of CCP censorship didn’t apply here, in her Quaker high school in New York.  Instead, I tried to ask some questions about what she was afraid of.  It struck me listening to her that, clarifying quietly in my mind that she’d still go forward, but really needed to voice her concerns, that in her case the loss of innocence is, in part, realizing that the two different worlds she knew, were at times impossible to reconcile.

The forever war, is winding down.  What a said state of affairs. NPR pointed out the long history of this conflict.  I suppose I assumed the guy would go all the way back to the retreat from Kabul in 1848 but rather he suggested that the current conflict began in 1973 with Daoud Khan’s overthrow of Zahir Shah.  

 

I biked up to the Wallkill River bridge on the rail trail this afternoon.  I’ve been fine with the second-hand bike I’ve been using.  But today it was made clear to me that, besides perhaps addressing the aching in my coccyx , a new bike might be a quite a bit different.  Pedaling along at a crisp clip, in highest gear with the most torque I was happy enough with my progress till a kid who was idly pedaling along on a slick new trail bike blew past me and left me in the dust.  Perhaps I, should get such a bike, I reckoned.  I don’t think I’d get any more or less exercise but I’d presumably cover more ground. 

Back home ‘twas time for a shower.  On the trail its twentieth century classical composers, as a rule.  Not sure why.  Today was Joan Tower’s “Sequoia.”  Scraping my face in the bathroom, I turn to bee bop jazz, usually, but as I thumbed through the hundreds of albums that are only mere pinky nail images on my Spotify, I spied the familiar image of “All Mod Cons”, the third album by the Jam.  I knew immediately I would listen to it, as loud as the little Pixel would play it.  Bruce Foxton’s silly two tone boots and slacks, Rick Buckler’s sneakers and the uncharacteristically odd photo of the otherwise eternally photogenic Paul Weller, slouched in the back of the photo.  “To be someone must be a wonderful thing.”  All the lyrics, known by heart, falling effortlessly now, from my lips, in with the hot water on my back. 

Wednesday, 04/14/21

Graucho On the Wall

I don’t suppose there is anything anyone could do about it.  Westchester County will always have primal centrality for me.  It is forever familiar.  I grew up here.  And I haven’t lived here since, what?  1980 or so, when I moved (reluctantly) up to Poughkeepsie, into my maternal grandmother’s place.  Any friends I had have long since left and I don’t know anyone who still lives here.  My dad and stepmom moved up to Ulster County a few years back.  They were last hold outs. 

 

Driving down 684, I approach Bedford Hills, where my dad, my stepmom, my brother used to live.  Memories of driving from his house, to his house, around his house to some place near his house.  The rocks, the trees, the underpass, everything is familiar.  The GPS says to get off 684 in Goldens Bridge.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen this hamlet before, beyond the drive past the Metro North Station. I skirt along a side road that approximately hugs 684, passed farm houses that have long since been redone into posh chateaus and mentally I compare them to the farmhouses of Ulster County, further north that haven’t yet been gentrified.  All along the way I am convinced that I’ll see a sign for Armonk any moment now, but soon I’m swearing as the GPS is now leading me back on to 684 going south.  This means I’ve idiotically wasted my time for the last twelve minutes, pointlessly pursuing side roads.  Anger then, at the inanimate, artificial intelligence. 

The Doc I’m seeing had tended to my ex-brother-in-law, who had in-turn recommended him to my father.  An osteopath, he’d offered my dad a few simple suggestions that, to hear my pop speak had changed his life. I’d been born without a hip socket and had one built from other bones of mine and it grew and held and miraculously it has worked fine for the last 55 years.  But for the last decade or so I’ve increasingly had pain on my left foot that can cause me to limp.  More recently a pain which I’d mistakenly self-diagnosed as one-too-many bottles of Gruner Veltliner inflaming my kidney or my liver, turned out to be a muscular ache, tied to the same physiological ache in my left foot.

 

I liked Dr. Erner from the get-go.  He had a mirthful photo of Graucho on the wall, as the fearless Captain Spaulding sitting next to an outraged Margaret Dumont as Mrs. Rittenhouse from “Animal Crackers.”  He had me stand, sit, bend over, and press one raised knee inward and then do the same with the second and with that he seemed to grok my body’s imbalance.  The insoles I had?  Useless.  He wants me to see his recommended podiatrist and to get a back exam and return. 

He wrote up a prescription as we looked down on the cherry blossoms that lined the parking lot of the office park down below.  I mentioned the sakura of Tokyo and he rushed me into his office to show me the work his son had produced during a program he had attended in Tokyo, to learn to draw manga.  And I told him that my little one is now obsessed with the same aesthetic. 

 

It will be remarkable if this consultation really does lead to the resolution of my foot pain, my back pain.  Odd that I waited this long to do something about this. 

 

 

 

Tuesday, 04/13/21

Out to His Van

 

Dan’s here.  I knew Dan was coming.   But I didn’t know when he’d get here. He needs towels.  Big beach towels.  No.  He doesn’t want any coffee.

Our dishwasher conked out about a month ago.  You’d open the door after a load and the water was still there in the bottom.  Then sometimes it wasn’t there.  My wife had the ‘just don’t press that button’ theory which seemed to work until it didn’t.  We called the plumber.  He came.  Couldn’t fix it.  Said it was probably the pump.  And he pointed out that “Clarksons” had affixed a sticker to the inside of the machine.  You should call them. 

I did.  And I don’t know why a lot of the service companies in this area seem to have attitudes, but they do.  They guys who fixed my mower once and then again were, what’s the nice way to say it; rude.  Gruff perhaps.  I can do gruff back.  “Yeah.  No.  When?  How much?  Really?”  I needed a new unit for my ultra violet purification thing.  You’d think I was calling to ask to borrow the guys car or clean my shoes on his carpet.

 

Well, Dan was gruff too.  He called twice at around 7:15AM to say he’d be calling again, next week.   This was the time he always made his calls.  Fortunately, I didn’t care, as I’d been up on calls since 5:00AM but when someone calls at 7:15AM you expect the tone is just a bit softened.  Not Dan.  He’s busy.  And he doesn’t want to waste his time.  No.  He can’t tell you when he’ll arrive.  He has lots of other visits and will be there between nine and noon.

 

Well, turns out Dan was a nice guy.  He was an intelligent professional whose the third generation of his family doing such a business.  He knew the former owners of our house well. He taught me a few things and got the pump fixed only to discover a second pump was also farkakte.  He tried to replace it and ended up saying he’d work on the old unit and figure out how to seal the leak himself.  And I helped him bring the stuff out to his van.  I noticed he was moving quickly.  And I reckoned he had to move fast, as each stop was money made or money wasted.  By now I felt like I’d connected with Dan and I thanked him and genuinely bid him to be safe out there, servicing folks out there on the front lines as it were.  And I thought that it must be difficult to be smart and capable and make this type of work, where everyone is suspicious of your services and your pricing, go well. 

Monday, 04/12/21

A Striking Red Algae

 

Sunday’s here.  This was to have been the day my girls went on a rock-climbing lesson.  A date I chose in mid-December, one weekend seemed as good as any.  The folks at Alpine Endeavors wrote me two days back to suggest we reschedule.  Rain was expected.  I checked.  I saw and indeed they were right.  We’ve moved things out till next Saturday.  But sitting here typing just before 1:00 PM it would be wrong to say there isn’t a cloud in the sky.  The sky is an ominous quilt of grey clouds.  But it isn’t raining. 

 

I rode up to the bridge.  And even though it was a spring Sunday the clouds kept most people off the trail.  To the left, heading north, in one of the vernal pools by the swampy flood plains of the Wallkill I spied a puddle covered in what looked like a striking, red algae and I vowed to head down the steep track and investigate on my way back.  My mind was drawn back to a remarkable lake my stepdad and I had seen in Papua New Guinea, in a park, not far from Port Moresby as I recall, near one of the vast WWII grave sites they have there for U.S. and other Allied servicemen.  I have the photo somewhere in my basement in a box and I can’t refer to it easily, but this was on my mind when I ambled down the ravine to have a closer look. It is disconcerting, I can tell you, to see a body of water, completely covered in bright red carpeting. 

I got closer and realized whatever it was had fallen from the nearby tree.  I stooped over, assuming that I wouldn’t get anything to identify positively but the Seek app quickly told me that these were ‘coralbells.’  Really?  Cool.  No internet.  So, I couldn’t see anything else about this species, but I was immediately suspicious.  The same red droppings were all over the trail on the ride home.  I’ve stopped and identified most of the trees along this road before and it is terribly unlikely that I've suddenly just spied a new tree.  I stopped once, twice and a third time trying to identify more of trees I know, I’m pretty sure what I’d seen were the blossoms of the red maple. 

 

Riding out the cherry tree that flames up two hundred yards down the trail from here, as bright as any cherry in Shibuya, was finally in full flush.  I couldn’t help but comment on it to two young ladies who were walking along, as I rode by.  “Look up there.  Isn’t he marvelous?”  And they couldn’t, but agree.  Back home I searched out the trowel, went down to do more guerrilla planting of pumpkins and squash in our field besides the rail trail.  And now, the dahl and the curry, nearly prepared, it is pouring rain as they predicted.  This must be shaking the cherry blossoms and ideally activating those newly deposited pumpkin seeds I was able to lay down. 

 

 

 

Sunday, 04/11/21