Lake Minnewaska was the destination. We’d gone up once and then again during the winter, my father and I, and the carriage trail was on both ocassions, covered in a sheet of ice that wasn’t appropriate for trotting along. We went today and took a turn off and up towards something called the Castle Rock Carriages Trail. Stunning. Views here and there down onto Lake Minnewaska which seems to fall off the cliff and disappear into the horizon. Views off to the other side above the valley between this range and the Catskills. The trees down below to the east, beyond there the lake stopped, were just now turning color. As always there were unique species one only sees up in the Gunks like the miraculous striped maple, with their leaves extending iridecently and their striking seed pods dangling down.
An old friend and I dined for lunch at Nelly’s Retaurant which serves Domincan Food. I had some goat and soursop fruit and we sampled plantains and empanadas. It was grand to see her, this old friend I hadn’t seen in thirty-years. She was mighty and mature and still the same soul I’d always known. Her father had recently passed away, and as it was, my father whom I had just been plodding around up at Lake Minnewaska with, was a friend of her dad. They’d both been publishers in another era. I tried to let her know about some of the genuinely heartfelt and salutatory things my dad had, had to say about her pop.
My little one was so nervous heading over to Poughkeepsie High School this morning to take her first official SAT. I tried to suggest that at least it wasn’t what all the friends she’d had as a little kid were going through in China with the gaokao. That really was all or nothing. If this SAT didn’t go well, take another. Mix and match scores and or apply to the ever-growing number of institutions that no longer care to review such things as SAT scores. Still, it’s stressful. A staff worker came outside in the drizzle and read off her obligatory list of things to say, “have you been exposed to covid,” etc. They said something about a New York State issued form of ID. My daughter had a passport in her possession, which suggested she was born in California. Was this to be a problem? I sat around in the car and re-read the Euripides “Bacchae” reveling in the anarchic punk quality of Dionysus and reckoned that they’d likely let her in with the ID she had.
Later in the day, we returned, picked her up and shuffled both girls over to the other side of the building where, as luck would have it, they were now supposed to get their second vaccine shots. My wife and I explained to the staff, who asked if we were actually getting shots. "Merely parents" We’d be standing on the side, watching. Oddly, as if deliberately, they were playing the provocitively bad pop music of the days when I would have been a high school student. The very music I would have hated violently back in 1983, when MTV was just getting started and we watched the horrible videos of terrible songs, waiting and hoping that something good would eventually come on. “I Ran So Far Away” by “A Flock of Seagulls” thumped away loudl from some speaker in the ceiling and I tried to read Medea and her ferocious exchange with Creon. The bad music of that era most definitely was.
Saturday, 05/ 08/21
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