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