Didn't Dwell on This

 

Wasn’t long before I got one and then another call done that I had to get presentable and drive the older one over to the dentist.  One of the calls I had to do was to dentalplans.com who I’d arranged to join on Thursday at the prodding of my dentist, as they suggested it would cost under $200.00 and save me much more on the ugly bills I was staring down.  I rang them and got the wrong department of course but the right person confirmed they had spelled my name wrong on my email.  Now I had the confirm. 

Over at the dentist they confirmed that I’d save more than I paid for the plan in the first place.  Somehow they have decided to play the worst pop hits of the early eighties as the muzak track de jour, at this dentistry.  It is certainly the hateful music I hate most in the world and I made arrangements to head outside and read my book in the car.   On the way out one of the ladies asked me if I’d my daughter had called me “baba” which I confirmed.  “They grew up in China.”  She suggested she called her father the same thing.  She didn’t appear to be Chinese but I never confirmed what other culture it was that also used the term. 

 

I hadn’t expected to, but I dozed off in the car after a page or two.  Next thing I knew she was down in the lot, with a mouth full of Novocain and a bill for . . . the full amount.  I called and they mentioned a mistake and a promise to credit it towards my younger daughter’s bill when she arrived next week.  I could have made a fuss but just drove home instead. 

We stopped by my mom’s.  She and my step dad are off in Long Island, enjoying the shore.  I promised to take a walk around which I did.  Everything seemed normal.  But I got a somber feeling walking in the back.  They weren’t there.  They weren’t supposed to be there.  But someday, certainly it will be a day when they will never be there.  I didn’t dwell on this for long and went back to the car and drove off back across  the river. 

 

 

 

Monday 07/26/21

 

 

Her Red Target Shirt

 

I can feel the air conditioning rising-up from the vent, at my feet.  During the day its’ imperative, but at night it isn’t always necessary.  For now, it feels good.   The Central Hudson bill was $235 for the month.  That certainly seems like a lot.  I’d mentioned to the girls to be careful with their wall mounted air conditioners on the second floor, but perhaps its’ something else.

 

Today at 9:30AM I was speeding up 87 to Kingston.  My older one had to get to work.  For the second day in a row, I told her to put on tunes, but she reminded me that she couldn’t until the car was stopped because it involved removing one phone and adding another.  Cloudy day, hot, humd, but not excessive.  My daughter doesn’t want to go in to work today.  She has on her red Target shirt. 

Read all morning.  Read when I got home.  Took a nap and read.  I finished off Cela’s “The Family of Pascual Duarte” after reading his “Journey to the Alcarria.”  A colleague and former student had recommended “Carmen.” I read it.  Another had recommended “The Alchemist.”  I read it too, quickly as I wanted to get to some of these Lorca plays which I also seemed determined to read today.  They were all cruel and gynocentric.  “The Ornament of the World” by Rosa Menocal will take me longer.  Anyway,  the day was already done. 

 

My older one had mentioned chickpeas.  I imagined something with small pieces of potato and zucchini baked mixed with the chickpeas.  Some olive oil.  Some fennel seed.  I linked it.  She ate around the zucchini.  I made some bruschetta for her that was better received.  The rack of lamb which she didn’t eat, I cut into chops and those came out well, if a bit fatty. Grilled lamb chops with cumin and paprika and sea salt always remind me of Beijing.

Sunday, 7/25/21

I Just Want Them

 

 

It wouldn’t be appropriate to sleep here, though I’m tired.   I’ve brought my lap top to Prestige Toyota in Kingston New York, where they are replacing the tire I blew yesterday.  Only a little while ago there had been a half a dozen people in this waiting area, where I’ve waited before.   Fortunately, as I didn’t bring any headphones, they were all quiet.  But one by one they’ve been told their cards are ready and they rose to left.  Diane has come to notify me.  But for now, I’ve time to write.  Off in the distance beyond Route 9, beyond the miserable signs and cars and criss-crossing wires are the majestic Catskill Mountains. 

“My Last Sigh” is the autobiography of Luis Brunuel and after finishing off "Tristana" I dug in, on my good friend’s recommendation.  It was charming and certainly insightful as it concerned the Lorca and Dali and Breton.  Surrealists are not, it would seem, and predictably enough, particularly consistent and I didn’t think much for his justifications for bad movies and uninspired acts.  But it was fun to be with a heavy drinker and it was humbling to think of the choices faced by people who really had to chose between anarchist forces, communist forces and fascist forces.  I’ll see if I can find his treatment of “Tristana” on my collection of movie-viewing channels I reluctantly consider from time to time. 

 

An older white man, which is to say a peer-level white man, has just come in and sat down with a young black man.  I’ve stared at them twice.  I do not care that they are one race or another or whether or not they are friends, relatives or lovers.  I just want them to stop talking because before they walked in it was perfectly quiet in here and I could think as I type.  The hairy eyeball seems to have worked.  They are both staring off in space, quietly just now.  Some guy who works here is on the phone speaking Spanish in a ridiculous voice, but this is a lesser form of distraction because I can’t really understand a thing he is saying. 

 

Yawning.  Always yawning.  I keep oddballs sleeping hours and it doesn’t matter that I went to bed early and slept late and had a few cups of coffee this morning.  My body is still demanding rest, almost instinctively, preparing it would seem for the next bout of deprivation.  Off to my side is Camilo Jose Cela’s “Journey to the Alcarria” which he wrote about himself in the third person in 1948.  A Nobel Laureate, I’d read Cela’s “The Hive” the last time I visited Spain thirty years ago, though I can’t remember a single salient thing about it other than the twisted face of the guy on the cover of the version I’d had.  I also have a Lonely Planet Spain, which I want to review as well.  One book is on the left.  One is on the right.  But the first thing I may do is revisit the restroom, even though I was just here forty-five minutes ago.  

 

 

 

Saturday 07/24/21

 

Take an Astronomy Class?

 

We played a lot of music during this ride, though I didn’t play “My Old School.”  But that’s where my younger one and I were heading.  Route 84 east, into Connecticut, past all those familiar signs for Danbury, Watertown, Meriden and then over towards Middletown.  We had an appointment for a 9:00AM school tour at Wesleyan, my alma mater.   Last night around 4:45PM my daughter said she was still on a waiting list for the tour.  I called them, mentioned my year and asked if we could get a confirm on a visit, which they kindly, now confirmed. 

 

I’d been up with client calls since before 3:00AM and had drank plenty of coffee.  I wore a long sleeved brown shirt on what would surely be another hot day, as I didn’t want anyone to have to stare at the horror-show that was my poisoned-ivy forearm.  I shook my little one around 5:30AM, just before my last call.  I wanted to leave by 6:00AM so we could have breakfast at O’Rourke’s the classic diner of yore, there in town.  I’d checked.  They were still there and would be open. 

 

We’re heading to Spain next month and I’d been reading “The Sun Also Rises” to my little one and with all this driving before us, I’d downloaded it ahead of time and threw on the audio book as we were heading up the drive.  My little one promptly rolled over and attempted to go back to sleep, so I paused it and decided we’d play it later, when she was actually awake.  Overhead I marveled at an enormous cloud that looked like a continent and turned the radio up a little as the Pidge on WFMU’s Wake and Bake show had thrown on Iggy’s “Real Cool Time.”  And with that, my daughter asked me if I’d remembered my Covid vaccine card.  “Sure.  It’s in my wallet.”  She didn’t have hers though and our second destination, Connecticut College had requested it, so we returned, secured the card and I got to marvel at the cloud a second time.

Been fasting for a few days.  We reached O’Rourke’s with a good forty-five minutes to spare.  They were closed.  We had a bagel somewhere else on main street that wasn’t here thirty-six years ago and headed up to the admissions office.  A smart, personable, articulate young lady of vaguely Asian descent showed us around.  I tried to see it all through my daughter’s eyes.  And I tried to imagine why it was I didn’t do any of the remarkable things she was describing, when I had the chance a life time ago.  There is an observatory on Foss Hill.  Why, for example didn’t I take an astronomy class? 

 

I did my best to keep quiet, but the strange environment worked its magic and sure enough my younger one decided she liked it.  “It was cool.“ Good.  She certainly has much better grades and much better work habits than I ever had.  We’ll see.  We’ll see.  After the info session, during which another parent recognized mine and introduced herself.  Our parents were friends.  We hadn’t seen each other in forty years . . . we drove down to the coast and got a lunch in New London, at precisely the same place my older daughter and I had done, four years ago, before we’d visited Connecticut College.  They have a lovely campus and I tried to master my late day tiredness, walking in to view what a real dorm room looked like.  One thing I was looking at fresh, at this campus and back at Wesleyan was the trees.  Though they both had stately trees, the variety on either campus was nothing to brag about.  A place that was, remarkable in that regard was Middlebury in Vermont, which we’d visited last year.  I did spot a Kentucky Coffee Tree, which I’d never seen before and I snatched a seen pod which I pocketed with the intention of planting back home.  All the ride home she played power-pop, Japanese anime theme songs and the ride went fast, and I never tired, because every time her song ended I got to through on the most aggressive punk I could think off to complement the vibe.  It wasn’t until after we’d crossed the Hudson and had ordered the evening’s family pizzas from Lombardi’s in Gardiner that we had a flat tire which we pulled over and replaced with the spare. 

 

 

 

Friday 07/23/21

 

Consider I Start Saving

 

I don’t know why, though we didn’t end up seeing the dentist much in Beijing.  The Western ones were a fortune and the Chinese one’s were spooky.  And I wasn’t insured.  I’d wanted to get my daughter’s braces now that we’re back in the U.S. and before we could we’d need to get some cavities addressed.  We drove today to Dr. Trimboli, at dentist my mom uses, not far from where I went to high school, in the hopes that he’d be a bit more merciful on us than the quotes we’d gotten on this side of the river.

 

He was.  A bit.  And he seemed to have a nice chair-side manner which wasn’t the case for the person my younger one had originally had her mouth prodded by.  Checking out, confronting the enormity of what would be required to fill these holes they suggested I consider I “Start Saving.  Keep Smiling” with :DentalPlans.com.  By paying approximately $175.00 I would save around 20% on my upcoming bills and let’s just say that if this were true I would be saving much more than $175.00.  I don’t understand precisely how it is that DentalPlan.com makes its money.  I don’t care.  Something is being properly stroked by securing my participation in this plan, so that overhead is no longer required. 

I usually didn’t want to go anywhere near food after visiting the dentist but the younger one wanted bubble tea and we drove down Route 9 to the section of the mall where the tea joint was.  No one ever walks into this bubble tea place and exits before at least ten minutes has expired and so I rang up DentalPlans.com and before my daughter’s had exited, I’d talked a plan through with a woman whose name I’d asked and acknowledged but now cannot recall, but whom I thanked as I would now have a plan, in time for the older one’s return to Dr. Trimboli next Monday.

With that we went over to my mom’s place.  She and my stepdad were out on the porch.  We talked dentistry and then Long Island as they were heading out there the next day, to the north fork where my sister had a place for the next two weeks.  My daughters are invited.  Perhaps they’ll go.  I must say I’m not overly excited about a trip to Long Island.  I’ve been back in New York for nearly two years now and I realize it is what people do in the summer, but I have no interest.  Rather, I explained to them that I’d taken the plunge this morning and done what I hadn’t done in at least eighteen months:  I’d bought round trip tickets for the family.  We’re off to Spain in three weeks.  I hope we don’t regret it. 

Thursday 07/22/21

 

Try to Stay Quiet

 

Appropriate perhaps for a drive to work with a psychology major, my older daughter and I talked about dreams on the way up to Kingston.  In her dream, her boyfriend had turned out to be a gangster.  If you knew her boyfriend, it would be immediately understandable why this could only be inexplicable and humorous in equal measure.  The boyfriend of the dreams casually confessed to having been involved in opaque, gangster-like activity.  The cops wanted my daughter to wear-a-wire and she didn’t want to do this.  I was curious to know what it was she was watching all night up there in her room, so that cops with wiretaps were asserting themselves this way. 

I’d had a more predictable, protean dream.  I was on a train, but I’d forgotten my backpack in another car, so I went to get it and I got distracted when I remembered my backpack, I was worried that it wouldn’t be there anymore.  Do the activities of the day, impact where in the memory hoard the mind searches for settings, and people and tensions to play out the day’s release at night?  We wondered about this as we exited the New York State Throughway and cut our way over to the overdeveloped strip of Route 9W where the Target she was working at was situated. 

 

I guess I’ve sheltered my daughters some.  She’s twenty and is only now discovering that eight-hour shifts, stocking shelves are boring.  That standing around on your feet all that time is tiring.  That there are many people who are working there who, unlike yourself, don’t have much choice in the matter. Still, she got off her ass and found the job without much prodding.  I’ll try to stay quiet about the fact that it doesn’t make sense economically, as it requires her mother or I to drive up and back for thirty minutes each way and consumes the attendant amount of gas.   I’ve very glad that she is talking to the other people there, who she works with.  They customers who come in and look for things like ketchup.  It’s part of learning to be American, for she who isn’t really from here.

I head over to the edge of the enormous parking lot they have at Target, after dropping her off, determined to figure out why it is my phone’s Bluetooth won’t connect with the car.  Eventually I have it reconnected and I ring back a number that had called me.  Spam.  What did I expect?  Then I call Japan and speak with a colleague for the next ninety minutes.  We’ve both been doing a lot of work to fix something that needs better coordination.   Back home I park the car at the head of the driveway and finish the last twenty minutes of our conversation, for if I’d driven down to the house the call would necessarily drop.  It’s Wednesday.  I’ve wondered about this and now I know when the garbage truck comes and actually picks up our garbage on Wednesday mornings.  It isn’t as early as I’d thought.  

 

 

 

Wednesday 7/21/21

After a Deliberate Pause

 

It isn’t a pretty song.  It captured my imagination for a short while as a thirteen-year-old.  I had run for some middle school office.  It may have been class-president.  But all I can remember running for the right to do, and then actually doing, was playing music in the lunchroom.  I fervently liked music that no one else liked.  I hated everyone else’s music.  But I won.  And ended up playing things like the Sex Pistols in the middle school cafeteria.

I can remember playing “EMI.”  I don’t think I ever played “Bodies” but I’m sure I thought of it.  Miraculously for my thirteen-year-old mind, the way one might consider a gymnast who could leap in the air and spin five times before landing, the song used the word “fuck” five times, rather overtly.  “Who Are You” was a Who song on the radio which managed so squeeze in a muffled “Who the fuck are you?”  But there was nothing discrete or tricky about what Johnny Rotten was saying.  The barrage of profanity was unmistakable confrontation after a deliberate pause.  And that’s all that mattered as I hadn’t any meaningful way to consider what an abortion was, yet.

 

The song was on my mind today, as there is another part of the song where Mssr. Lydon suggests the unfortunate topic is a “gurgling, bloody mess.”  Staring repeatedly at my left forearm today, mopping up an unerring stream of puss this description seemed most apt.  I have a rather epic case of poison ivy.  I guess I’d forgotten that it could get this bad.  There is a six-inch by two-inch strip of tender pale skin that is aflame with pustules.  I keep daubing it with calamine lotion.  Calamine lotion should work to dry it up and speed the end of it all, but I don’t think I’m even halfway through this yet.  Rivulets of puss make a mockery of the pretty pink covering. 

A long-sleeved shirt at least protects the rest of my family from having to consider this living road kill.  I snapped at my younger daughter during dinner when she asked me to show it to her sister.  Back at my desk there is a roll of paper towels.  I keep peeling off individual sheets, patting myself and tossing them.  But there is no end to this process.  There is too much carnage for anything to properly coagulate yet.  I have, of course, thought back over my activity.  What happened a few days ago to invite such a dramatic reaction?  Was it the quality of my encounter or the potency of that particular combination of three leaves and a petiole that set me aflame?

 

 

 

Tuesday 7/20/21

Because My Left Forearm

 

Waiting on the phone for Verizon.  All I wanted to do was pay them.  Before this I was waiting online with the company, Asurian Enterprise, that was supposed to be responsible for fixing my daughter’s cracked screen.  Yesterday the gent at Russel Cellular told me to call the number, they’d come by and fix the phone.  I asked my younger one to manage it.  It’s her phone after all.  She didn’t like this but dutifully called and was told it was an AT&T number.  Calling back Russel Cellular just now they confirmed that I’d been given the wrong number.  The right number doesn’t want to talk to me.  They do everything in their power to get you to fill out a form online. I pursued the phone option as long as I could until they asked for a pin I couldn’t properly identify.  I handed the online option off my daughter in a huff and was surprised when she ended the call with me in a huff.

 

Now I am in an endless loop with Verizon.  The song is horrible.  An uninspired hook that builds the slightest tension and releases it clumsily.  It’s faintly murmuring from my phone on the table beside me.  The robot had told me I would have a seven-to-nine-minute wait.  Twenty-three minutes later I hung it up and started over.  Yelling at a robot.  “Human being!  Human being!  Now I am back with the jazz loop with the vague sense that now it is the hold queue for billing which will certainly be shorter than the queue for whatever I was in before.  This is the experience for when I want to more rapidly give them money.  God only knows what it’s like for when I expect some additive service to me, from them. 

The house is hot.  I have a long-sleeved shirt on.  It’s the same one I had last night.  I’m not wearing it for fashion or for temperature but because my left forearm looks as though I have smallpox.  It is oozing puss and blood, aflame with a poison ivy reaction.  I’m not sure just what seething bush I brushed against, but it got me good.  I could feel it coming on Friday.  Now it’s Sunday and I’ve been putting calamine lotion on every few hours, hoping it would dry up the mess, but it hasn’t arrested anything.  This clammy, irritated sense is adding to my irritation as I wait for a Verizon representative to relieve me from this muzak. 

 

This is aging, I suppose.  You become more annoyed than ever at the futility of what most people take for granted.  Why persevere in trying to speak with a human being?  This is old fashioned.  This is a sign of insanity or senility.  It will only get worse.  How long before there is an overt premium to pay for speaking to a human, rather than a robot.  Is it my stupidity to believe them when they say the wait time will be eleven minutes and then get frustrated now as I check and notice we’re closing in on sixteen minutes?  “I believed you. Again.” Shame on you, you fool. 

It’s cloudy outside.  But it isn’t supposed to rain.  Waiting online I managed to finish an uninspired daily blog.  Now I’ll go over to the floor behind me and meditate for thirty minutes and then go take the bike ride I didn’t have time for yesterday. 

Monday 07/19/21

Monsters, Magic Cures, Mountains

 

A birthday party for my sister last night.  We went out for pizza.  My nephew was talking about a trip to Disney World.  I suggested that I would rather go to the dentist.  He mentioned that Disneyworld was better than Disneyland and that either, was certainly better than the Hong Kong Disneyland that I’d taken my kids to.  I insisted that all of the things he was mentioning that were supposed to be cool, like the riding in the Millennium Falcon and staying in a Disney hotel and riding to Space Mountain were, on the balance, less preferable than oral surgery.  I was being ironic and I certainly don’t begrudge him or anyone the pilgrimage to Orlando but somehow it really annoyed my daughter who didn’t see the humor in it. 

 

The pizza was OK.  The ice cream they have there at Pomodoro in Highland is even better. We got a lot of stuff, including some wine for the ladies and sped back home.  Somehow, I wound up with “Get Your Ya’s Ya’s Out” on the audio.  I skipped “Stray Cat Blues.” Hate the lyrics.  Particularly enjoyed the slide in “Love in Vain.”  But back at the house I surrendered any claim to DJ and we played tunes my sister adored like ABBA and later Michael Jackson.  She’d brought a Karaoke machine which we were keen to use but she forgot the mic so we simply listened.

It rained when they arrived.  Then, there was no rain, so we could eat outside.  I stood against the railing as we didn’t have enough chairs and my mom fretted.  Clouds gathered and it rained again just as we were coming in.  Not long after it stopped.  Listening to the “Mamma Mia” soundtrack, I got the urge to go outside again and convinced my stepdad to go and have a look at the trees I’d planted.  We had a good stroll until the drops began to fall again and got inside just as a deluge returned. 

I took to reading after they left and finished Mark Edward Lewis’ “Sanctioned Violence in Early China.” Earlier he’d referenced an early Chinese work I hadn’t been familiar with:  The Shanhaijing a translation of which was available on Amazon and, just like that it arrived today.  Monsters, magic cures, mountains with colorful names, it is not unlike the earlier Odyssey or, later the Age of Bede where animals without heads and owls that eat people and fish that, when you eat them help to ensure your armpits don’t smell, are all lurking there, just over the next mountain.  Forever appreciative, I wasn’t sure what to expect when I shared it with my wife, but she’d heard of it and knew of the reference, even though it wasn’t anything she’d dug into of late.

 

 

 

Sunday 07/18/21

Armada At My Doorstep

On my desk are many books about Spain.  There is a large book of poems by Fredric Garcia Lorca.  Perhaps like you I have always know of him but I haven’t actually spent time with his poetry.  Neither do I know his plays.  “Blood Wedding”, “Yearma” and “The House of Bernarda Alba” are also on the desk in a collection.  That great legitimizer for what might be worthy to read, the NYRB, had tagged both “The Life of Lazarillo De Dormes” written anonymously and banned during the Counter Reformation as well as “Tristana” written some three-hundred years later by Benito Pérez Galdós both call out to be read, right away.  The first time I’d gone to Spain, thirty-two years ago I read the Nobel Laureate, Camilio Jose Cela’s “The Hive” which I don’t remember well but it didn’t stop me from ordering “The Family of Pascual Duarte” and “Journey to The Alcarria” both of which look like they will be quick reads and perhaps more memorable.  Neither the “Imprudent King:  A New Life of Philip II” nor Hugh Thomas “The Spanish Civil War”, the latter demanding 943 pages of attention, will be quick.  “The Alchemist” by Paulo Coelho will be and I suspect “Ornament of the World:  How Muslims, Jews and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain,” by Maria Rosa Menocal will be consumed at a crisp clip.   I got “The Sun Also Rises” to read with my younger daughter and am hoping I can persuade the older one give “For Whom the Bell Tolls” a try.  And out on the kitchen table are “Grape, Olive, Pig: Deep Travels Through Spain's Food Culture” by Matt Goulding, “Duende: A Journey Into the Heart of Flamenco” by Jason Webster, “Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through Spain and Its Silent Past” by Giles Tremlett are all out on the kitchen table for the Mrs.  There are more on the way, but you get the point.  I’m preparing to go to Spain. 

I’d asked a few friends who might have had opinions.  They all said: “Cervantes” Yes.  Of course.  I read 'DQ' thirty-two years ago, and it would grand and appropriate to read it again.  I remember laughing aloud the first time.  But perhaps, evolving as one ought to do, I’ll broadcast the ebook for part of the drive through Castile-La Mancha.  My kids are OK.  The CDC seems to be OK.  The Spanish government and the United States government seem to be OK with vaccinated Americans traveling to Iberia.  My wife still isn’t sure.  But she never is, until we’re on the plane. The books help to make it real.   A fledgling approach to commitment. 

 

This will interrupt the China reading I’d finally gotten back into.  I’d finished “The flood Myths of Early China” by the Stanford professor Mark Edward Lewis yesterday and “Every Day Life in Early Imperial China” by the Cambridge prof Michael Loewe today.  Both of whom I learned about from the “Cambridge History of China” series.  This morning dug into the other work of Mark Edward Lewis I have “Sanctioned Violence in Early China” just as Amazon was depositing this Spanish armada at my doorstep.  I’ll finish the Lewis, but then I can’t wait to dig in.  My older one was saying that grad school was appealing because . . . you got to research and read all day.  Aye, that’s a very fine and illusive objective.

It is my sister’s birthday today.  She was getting a lube job when I called her but apparently, she’s off to play some tennis and then will be here not long from now.  I must go out and get a present.  The Disney princesses cap I got at Aldi shopping a few hours ago, will not suffice.  I was at Aldi’s in Kingston you see, because I was dropping the older one off at her first day at work.  She has a summer job at Target, which is good money from her perspective at $15.00 per hour.  And it works well as long as she has a driver.  Sleepy, suddenly.  I best go gift shopping before I give in to the call of the pillow.

Saturday, 07/17/21

Of Course, Many Possibilities

My dad’s off in Fire Island.  He won't be joining me on any walk in the woods this morning, as we usually do on Fridays.  I thought I’d be romantic or at least feign such by suggesting my wife and I go on a ‘date’ and walk Lake Minnewaska together and then go and have some breakfast.  I got a definite ‘maybe’ and then, late last night she said: “No.  If your family are coming the next day, I have to get the garden ready.”  My wife spends eight hours a day in the garden, and I suspect “ready” is forever on the horizon, but sure.  OK.  I headed upstairs and secured another ‘maybe’ from my little one.

Eight-thirty or so it was time to head out.  I’d been up for hours.   My first call was at three and the last ended at five-thirty and with that I spent two wonderful hours planning out the rough draft of just how to spend two weeks in Spain.  I don’t know if we’ll end up going but it’s looking more likely and I put a rough itinerary together involving Toledo and Cordoba and Grenada and Santiago de Compostela, none of which I’d seen before on my earlier travels in that country.  My bargain with my kids after ten days of museums and temples is usually to crash at some beach front area and while there is no dearth of coastline in Spain, I was laboring to find a place that would fit what they wanted and wasn’t insanely expensive. 

 

But at eight-thirty I went upstairs and shook my little one’s shoulder.  “Hey, you want to go out for breakfast?”  Her disposition is similar to mine, which I comprehend implicitly.  “Give me a few minutes to get up.”  She said, instead of “Huh? No.” as her older sister would have.  We’d hike before we ate, as I’d mentioned last night.  She’d  protested a bit when discussed, and then again before we got in the car this morning.  But soon we were talking about what a drag it was that some people in the online community associated with her favorite game Genshin Impact had claimed a dark-skinned character as “blasian;” which refers to a person’ of African and Asian descent.  A contrarian had suggested that it might simply be a dark-skinned Asian person, there are of course, many possibilities, but this was heartily rejected by the community.  I did my best to listen and weigh-in to this rather virtual hypothetical with what I thought was a sensible line of inquiry.  

Minnewaska . . . beautiful, as anticipated.  By 9:00AM on a Friday it was still only modestly populated.   We took the walk around the lake and my daughter couldn’t deny the grandeur of the fabulous alpine anomaly.  Once again, I was drawn to the all the remarkable species of trees: striped maple, bear oak, chestnut oak, pitch pine, birch that you don’t generally see down from the top of the Gunks.  I tried to delicately pull out a small striped maple and chestnut oak to see if I could transplant.  The bear oaks have such a hypnotizing green, but they grow slowly and even the smallest shoots seemed part of larger trees that weren’t right to disturb. 

Friday, 07/16/22

Have Been Repeatedly Doused

I 'll finish the mowing of the yard just in time to start it all over again.  Today I went back up to the top of the road with this new electric mower.  Certainly, we’re getting good use out of this thing.  It already looks like its three years rather than three weeks old, covered in green dust and mud.  The battery isn’t easy to gauge.  If you go round and round and short, flat grass it lasts longer than if you chew into tall wet growth that forces the mower to conk out.  With a gas mower this would be a drag.  Pull the chord again and again to get it to start.  But this thing just requires you to push the button with the rod clutched and then release.  One suspects this ease of use is hiding wear and tear on the device and on the man.

 There’s a patch of the lawn along the drive that must be the neighbors.  I mowed it anyway.  We have to look at it just like they do, driving up out of here.  When I first started using thing device I was very careful about avoiding all roots and rocks but now I think I have an idea of just how close I can get and more or less what it will do if it hits something it doesn’t like.  It will simply stop.  Down along the slope to the lawn beneath the cedars on the north of our property the lawn was very thick and very wet and there the mower conked out a few times, and this seemed to eat up much of the charge.  Because what had been five lights flashing strong and changed to two lights left, suggesting that a full 2/5 of the juice is gone.  

Whether the battery is all used up after forty-five minutes or sixty, mowing on an empty stomach it is always the right time to stop.  Drenched in sweat, the air pregnant with humidity, the atmospheric amniotic sack ready to break, any moment, I wheel the mower back to the garage to pop the battery and let it charge.  I have on my black jeans which have been repeatedly doused with Permethrin forcing any ambitious ticks to reconsider the migration from my pant leg to my armpits or groin.  (I had to look up the spelling of that nasty chemical just now.  It is stored in my mnemonic chamber rather differently as something like: “Premithliquin”, which of course yields nothing when you search for it. I note that my father, who recommended the insecticide and who as a publisher all his life, pronounces it properly, as I can hear his voice once I see the word written properly.)

 

While the battery is charging I dig a few holes back beside the fenced in garden, behind the fenced in garden, and right in the middle of the fenced in garden.  I’ve had a few striped maples and one chestnut oak in pots few a month or more.  I’d like to drop them in spots which, if they succeed, should do for a new home.  The striped maple leaves are big and colorful in the fall.  The chestnut oak, as the name suggest would have completely, unique saw-tooth leaves unlike the giant northern red oak to its side.  My hope is to one day, have these both as part of the fall foliage here.  We’ll see.  Or perhaps I won’t, but you will. 

Thursday, 7/15/21