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