Well Represented Here

My wife has been recording one-minute introductions to slices of life that she uses to communicate with smart Chinese women, considering modernity.  They’re short by design and protean so that they can be amassed and tagged easily enough to create a body of work.  “But what should I do today?” was the question. 

Trees.  Trees my love.  Our house is full of lovely deciduous trees that our Chinese brethren and sistren are unlikely to be aware of.  Consider, my love, the oak.  Here in the front yard and there in the back are oak trees.  They have wonderfully shaped and intoxicatingly green colored leaves.  They also produce acorns.  See here?  This is an acorn.  When we were young, we’d throw them at one another. 

Yes.  The oak.  It doesn’t grow in Beijing.  Nor, for that matter, in San Francisco.  Why?  Because its too damn, dry.  In Beijing we have willow and poplars because they have long tap roots that dig down deeply to where the water lies.  The poplar is the tree of the oasis.  The bai yang shu  is all you see when you go to Gansu and further on to Xinjiang, when you arrive in a town after crossing something inhabitable.  So admire for a moment then, the oak. 

And this guy here is the maple.  It’s a sugar maple, which is the state tree of New York.  Not to be confused with the national tree of Canada, the red maple.  The has its own cool leaf with its own cool color.  It too shuns SF and BJ.  It too is well represented here in our yard. 

So we head out to the oak and we shoot a few shots and settle on one where the oak is well-explained.  And we move on to the maple in the back yard and do the same.  I point out a sumac tree and what I think is a walnut.  “You know you could do something about poison ivy as well . . .  We don’t have poison ivy in Beijing”  But two trees is enough for today.  We are done. 

The Mall Is Ready

You like to shop?  I don’t.  It’s an obligation to fulfill, not a craving or a joy.  Why adopt this most Un-American of attitudes?  There is the practical reason:  If you succumb to whimsical, uninhibited shopping, you’ll be broke.  There is the Gandhi-an sense that you should make do what you have.  Shop-a-holic is a noun named purposefully.  But I’m not Gandhi.  I never learned to spin my own clothes.  Eventually a time comes when you need to buy new vestments.

I’ve stated this before.  No great epiphany here.  But America has tamed the world to the American consumers'" needs.  This will continue for a while I suppose and certainly not forever.  Living in Beijing, shopping, which is already a drag, is especially bothersome.  No one has my size shoes or my waistline.  XL means M in China.  But more pressingly, shopping means buying premium high end things or settling for cheapness, (used in the Zappalian sense).  You secure premium or bottom end, but quality middle-ware is all shipped over to the United States, where the customer is king. 

Home in New York for the summer, I budget time to pursue my rights as an American consumer.  Get a new pair of shoes, get new pants, get a new shirt now.  Because later, in China it will be a much less fruitful search for these things.  My kids are far less inhibited.  “YES!  I NEED TO GO TO THE MALL.”  "Right.  OK.  So do I."  Saturday, today, is our day to shop. 

I must say that approaching the mall we realize for the fourth year straight that there is a store at the mall called “Dicks”  This is funny.  My daughter’s and I imagine the lines that may be necessary working at such a place:  (Hi.  Welcome to Dick’s.  I’m one of the Dick’s.”) 

The Mall is ready for us.  Shopping at Target feels like walking within an American cathedral.  Pausing at the nave, where men’s and women’s, kids and adults are drawn and divided, I note all my fellow Americans.  My American daughters are given what would have been an impossible sum in my day, of $200.00 each to buy what they need.  This, rather than just presenting my credit card over and over and discovering later how much I'd spent. 

I go to the shoe store and get my requisite new pair of comfortable, presentable shoes.  I get pants in Macy's.  Then I get two shits in Banana Republic.  I ignore the name.  I ignore the allure of 40% off because I am thinking more like a business person than a shopper.  My daughters need more time.  I ‘harumph’ but use this time to drop my bags off in the car and return to the Cathedral to get cheap underwear, teeshirts and socks.  I even find a cheap pair of jeans.  Why pay more?  

We've been here so much longer than we intended. 

Closer Than You Think

My older daughter is wild about blueberries.  I’ve always thought of them as my favorite fruit as well.  The market in town that I tend to want to support, to the detriment of Stop N Shop, has just confirmed that while they have the chicken we need and the yoghurt and the humus and the milk, Jack’s Meats and Deli does not have blueberries.  “Go to the market right over the bridge.  They have great blueberries.  They’re fresh.”  “Right. OK.  Thanks.” 

We’ve been walking around town, and we consider whether or not to just walk over the bridge over the Walkill River.  The bridge couldn’t be more than a half a mile away.  It’s “just beyond” that.  I see a farm stand sitting there in my mind, in the field directly over the iron bridge.  This vision is one my mind has put together and it begins to take on an independent life.  I want to see it. 

This is the sort seductive mirage that metastasizes in the mind’s eye all the time traveling, with my kids.  I see a church or a museum or a better place to eat, not far, right around the next corner.  And we end up trudging much further than anyone had intended.  And it’s usually my fault, my insistence that something cool is worth the extra effort.  It’s closer than you think. 

Fortunately, in this instance, on this hot summer day, my older daughter, calloused as she is with many such trudges after the cool, calmly suggested that we should drive out.  It took a second.  I almost said “but its right there in a field across the bridge.”  I could imagine realizing the look down at the river from the bridge and the detail of a walk through a cornfield beneath the Gunks.  Once conceived, I wanted to fill in this detail.  I wanted to live the walk.

“Let’s drive baba.”  And we did, across the bridge.  You already know there was no farm stand right there at the other side.  We carried on for another mile till we saw what almost certainly had to be the market in question.  It was.  And we joked about how awful it would have been and how stupid I would have felt if I had insisted that we make the trudge. 

The blueberries were really good.  So were the peaches.  And the harvest of that walk over the bridge will need to remain in gestation until we are able to take it one once again, with full awareness of what we’re getting into.

Escape From Court

Shakespeare often has segues that shift the theatre of activity out into the woods.  Certainly in a “Mid Summer Night’s Dream”, Puck is out tricking folks in the woods for most of the production.  Dunsinane is brought up and into the production in “Macbeth.”  And in “As You Like It” the forest, like the rest of the world, is a stage for Olando and Rosiland to escape from court and make merry. 

I suppose there are more than a thousand places to see the man from Stratford on Avon’s works produced out of doors, across the United States this summer.  We were fortunate to once again be able to take in a production of “As You Like It” at the Boscobel estate near Garrison, New York.

The grounds are designed like an Italian villa with fruit trees, an herb garden and open before the home to an astounding view down over acres of marshland out towards a bend in the Hudson River and over to West Point.  Metro North trains are visible riding below, through the swamp.  I’ve ridden that a thousand times but had never considered this view.  They say MacArthur’s mom Pinky had an apartment across from his military academy dormitory at West Point where she could keep an eye on him.  With the right telescope this perch would have served her well.

And its always light out when show time arrives and we settle into our seats in the round.  And soon the sun is setting, unstoppably, while actors march across the lawn in the dusk, adding hundreds of yards of depth to the imagination.  And, as happens, it gets dark.  After intermission torchlight appears off in the distance and real stars in the sky and it is all rather easy to believe we are in the forest with the players, for just this evening.  

My kids want to know when it will be over.  “It’s a comedy.  Wait till everyone is smiling.”

Our Narrator is Quite Confident

Apple’s “maps” app, (I just checked to make sure it wasn’t named iMaps) has a British gentleman who narrates directions if you press start on the function.  It certainly sounds like a human, and not a robot.  And I used him incessantly when I was in Italy two years ago.  I associate his voice with British pronunciations of words like “San Nicola la Strada” and “Via G Marconi to Positano.” Now he is directing me through eastern Ulster County like a pro.  So did this gent really record all these street names or is there a machine learning function that allows the computer generated voice to approximate all the pronunciations?

It’s lovely over here, driving down to Gardiner and over to Milton.  I don’t know anything about these places.  If we were driving around the neighboring counties on the other side of the river, I’d know exactly where I was heading.  But this is all mysterious.  Monty, our narrator, is quite confident and we follow him without thinking. 

I am mostly fixated on the trees.  These towns seem to have plenty of trees that are 100 or so years old.  But every other turn there is a plane tree or an oak that must be four hundred years old.  Early in the trees progression, everything around them that might have enjoyed a bit of sun must have been removed and so they grew broad as well as tall.  I tell my kids that, that tree, (is it a sycamore?) must have been here when George Washington was a kid, when this was Indian territory.  This does not, however, spark a reply. 

We are heading to a restaurant within the Buttermilk Falls Inn.  One “n” less and you’d have a nice Maurice Sendack-like visual to that. “Milk for the morning cake!” This conference center is tucked into the woods, off the road.  Despite Monty getting me to the proper entrance, once inside, I am quickly lost.  My mother is giving me directions, which I assume leads off down a road this way.  Fortunately a waitress runs out of the building, down the road and stops us from this folly.  Patiently, she then accompanies us back to the restaurant and up to our table. 

Fine dining in Milton, is fine with me.  The waitress introduces us to her daughter who is also working this evening. Our meal is memorable, and I’m only sorry my wife didn’t get to join us this evening to learn about what’s available locally. She also, it dawns on me as I try to pay, has my credit card with her.  Outside by the small graveyard is an enormous pine that must be a few hundred years old.