Saying "Please, Shut up."

Clouds have risen a few miles above the Gunks and there is a nice opening to let the sun through at 7:26PM.  There is a big fat racoon who hasn’t waited until the nocturnal feeding time to come out and nobble around beneath the bird feeder.  Seems to be enough down there to satisfy him and keep him from bothering to try climb up to the honey pot of feeders full of seed six feet up.  Out in the living room is the aftermath of a Monopoly game my daughters and their nephew just played.  He’d headed off with my sister, back to Poughkeepsie, and the little one is upstairs in bed with another headache which has me worried.  Why do they always seem to plague her?  The doctor didn’t have an intelligent thing to say about it.  The older one is supposed to be cleaning up the Monopoly board before dinner, but one suspects she has already forgotten her promise. 

 

Those three did great today though.  We headed over early to Peter’s Kill to meet Jennifer the climbing instructor for their second lesson. The older one was keen to try a second time and the younger one didn’t object to going along.  The power of sisterhood, bleeding over then to persuading my nephew who is thirteen and was convinced that he didn’t ever want to rock climb, but he acquiesced and came along to try.  They all did wonderfully, ambling up, pausing, nearly giving up, continuing on. Jennifer and her trainer in training Emily were wonderfully encouraging and competent.  They wanted me and the Mrs. to come along, and I wouldn’t mind but its’ all rather expensive as it is, and I was content to head down for a walk to the Kill itself and marvel at how is sliced through the age-old rock shelf. 

Good Lord though, the man who was climbing with two women beside our troup was a dick.  My age or more he was going on and on about his girlfriends and their imperfections.  The poor ladies who were climbing with him seemed to think the best thing to do was humor him and encourage his banal nonsense with ill-timed snorts and giggles.  I had to physically restrain my tongue from saying: “Please.  Shut up.”  And I thought if this situation happened in Chinese, I might also imagine that what he was saying was not only annoying but involved me.  I might then not be able to resist the urge to say something, unnecessary.  None of us commented about it at the time but just now, around the dinner everyone immediately concurred that the bald gent with the dog was a tiresome asshole. 

I noticed that Curtis Fuller had died the other day.  Born in Detroit in 1932, he was 88 when he died in a nursing home in the same city on May 8^th.  I wrote a friend, an old teacher, who had taught me about bop early on that I was playing him all day long in memoriam.  I wrote my dear pal I used to wait tables at the Village Gate with, telling him he should indulge himself in the same behavior.  Wrote a group of friends as well, who share notes on music reminding them that its his trombone you hear in the opening lines of ‘Blue Trane’.  Taken for granted while they were alive, all these remarkable jazz practitioners are vanishing from living memory.

Saturday, 05/15/21