Drive With a Stick

 

Drove out to the high school today at my daughter’s request for a round of driving instruction. I learned to drive with a stick.  I inadvertently drove my father’s car into a fence pole when we were practicing.  Another time I was flummoxed, driving the stick shift out of our home.  Why wouldn’t it accelerate!  I’d gone over nearly a mile before I released the hand brake.  There were numerous other incidents. 

 

Today my older one wanted to practice driving.  We went out to the New Paltz High School where we haven’t gone since the height of COVID back in the spring.  Then there was really no one there in the lot.  Today there were two kids who appeared to be learning how to skateboard.  Two people to avoid.  Someone else was just parked over there, sitting.  A few other cars had no one inside them.  The police station isn’t far away.  I wondered about all the things that could go wrong and whether or not this was lawful. 

My daughter is very careful.  She seems comfortable keeping it under five-mph.  And we are driving an automatic with all sorts of gizmos like reverse imagery which makes the whole process much easier.   And she asks reasonable questions like:  “how do you park when there are other cars?” 

And she marvels at the high school around which we are driving and the rah rah band-stand and she says: “I always wondered what it would have been like to go to an American High School, with all the football games and the cheerleading.  She offers that this otherwise nondescript lot will always now be the place she learned to drive.  Only once does she step on the gas instead of the break.  She manages all the key functions well and I remind her, not for the first time that learning on a standard, back in the day, was much more challenging.

 

 

 

Wednesday, 08/26/20

Ordering Off a Menu

 

Allow your mind to stitch threads then, between the China of Qianlong and the Hudson Valley of the French and Indian War.  Contemporaneous and but for a few early tendrils of trade two seemingly independent epochs.  Not the eighty-two year old who dismissed Lord McCartney in 1793, played for a dotard by minister Heshen, this would have been a forty-eight year old, maintaining his grandfather’s reach against Kyrgyz and Dzungars and Uyghurs. 

 

1759, that year, would have been the year that this farmhouse was built.  People were shorter.  The tight passages and low ceilings of pre-Revolutionary American intimacy and compromise.  We’re dining out.  With others.  Remarkable.  We’re out at a restaurant and there are strangers and the familiar proprietor, and we’ll be ordering off a menu.  Novel, Corona Virus. 

For only the second or third time since we’d begun wearing these masks and keeping to ourselves we’re eating in a restaurant.  Masks on as you enter.  Certainly.  We’ll be eating outside so we can relax a bit, right?  We’ll be dining with older people whom we out to be especially mindful of protecting.  We sit with an appropriate amount of distance and de-mask.  The waitress has a mask.  I put mine back on.  She is bringing me a pint of Murphy’s now and I take it off again. 

 

Precisely what the protocol for de-masking and eating and re-masking is supposed to be, bite by bite.  The table across the way aren’t wearing masks.  But then, they’re eating.  One stands to take her dog outside and the door slams as she leaves.  It slams again when she reenters.  I think the clam chowder tastes lovely.  I tried to order things I couldn’t easily make at home.  A black-haired fella from that table is going out to smoke a cigarette and the door slams behind him.  Next time I am going to say something.    

The namesake proprietor has been well.  A heartfelt congratulations to that, it couldn’t have been easy.  A busboy tells me the WiFi password and the numerical portion is 1759.  Impulsive checking.  Deserts are huge and everyone’s stuffed and the evening was a smash.    I tell my gals to think of Qianlong and 1759 on the way out.  This doesn’t start much by way of exchange, but I know they heard it and caught the reference, nonetheless.

 

 

 

Tuesday, 08/25/20

Fidgeting, Restless and Noticing

Seven years old again there in Church.  Fidgeting, restless and noticing that the priest is talking about Christ and not about the person we all came here to honor.  Up.  Kneel.  Rise. Sit.   Medieval cadence.  No one can doze off.  Rise.  You’re taller than anyone you can see.  I know the next lines and I know that we are to repeat them.  My sister and everyone repeats them.  Keep silent. 

 

The metallic ciborium behind the alter, the fridge they keep the eucharist in, is popped open and the priest removes the body and returns to the alter with the monstrance.  Demonstrate.  It strikes me that both the priests, the older and the younger are white and speak clear English.  The older father has a wonderful red Irish look him that makes me want to like him.  And I considered my maternal grandmother who would tactfully complain that she couldn’t understand the new priest they had from Haiti nor the Vietnamese father who’d preceded him.  I wonder about this congregation.  Are there many young people are among the faithful?

 

A passage from the book of Psalms.  A bearded lad.  Immediate family, whom I don’t recognize but I can tell I like.  He reads well.  The passage comes to life with its Old Testament contradictions.  My beautiful cousin is crying, and it brings me back.  Her mother is gone.  Her mother’s funeral.  My cousin is the same bright-eyed girl I knew when we’d last met forty or more years ago, when her long grey locks were a different color.  It’s the same person.  And she reminds me of her older sister, who I know as an adult and who couldn’t be here today.

She wrote something though.  This was grand.  She’s a powerful lady and appeared suddenly with these words she’d written, which, in a light and playful way that only a child can invoke she finally and fully brought her mother into form. There she was, with that complicated smile.  Sorrow, humor, solemnity and to my reckoning and iconoclastic generosity on the part of the priests for allowing and indeed smiling during this freeform innovation my cousin had penned, venturing beyond the gate of what is otherwise meant to be done at a Catholic funeral. 

 

 

 

Monday, 08/24/20

That Could Be Cleaned

 

My aunt passed away on Friday.  I’ll join my dad and sister and attend her funeral tomorrow.  As one or another person of that generation passed, I generally missed the ceremonies as I lived on the other side of earth.  The last funeral I can remember attended was that of my father in law, out in Shandong, perhaps twelve years ago.  Tomorrow’s event is only an hour and a half’s drive so I’ll be sure to go.  My only challenge is I must head out to the garage and find the box that holds my formal attire.  I don’t have a suit to wear otherwise. 

 

It’s already 4:10AM on Monday morning in China.  One can only pretend it will be the “weekend” for a few hours longer.  People will soon begin to expect that momentum on expectant matters from Friday.  I need to head down to the shed where all our possessions, recently arrived and only partially unpacked, reside.  Somewhere down there is my suit and my clothes. 

 

There are eight boxes of or more of books.  A box or two of LPs, which made the trips from New York to Beijing, to San Francisco, to Hong Kong, to Beijing and back again.  And there are lots of boxes marked “tables” and “chairs.”  When you open them you find tables and chairs.  I was hoping to find my clothes.  Scissor in hand I cut up just about all the boxes down there before deciding it was unlikely that I’d find any of my clothes today, let alone the suit I had in mind.

There was a rough blazer up in the closet.  Maybe that would do.  Had I brought a tie along as well, just in case I needed to go to Japan for meetings?  Instead, when I opened my closet I found my tan suit.  There was stain spittle on the inside lapel that looked as though I’d last attended an event at a mud-geyser but that could be cleaned.  In the sock drawer in the bedroom I found a tie.  I’d prefer a dark suit.  I’d prefer to have a pure white shirt, but now I was much further along the road towards funeral legitimacy.  It will be a while thought before I learn if any of those other suits I had have made it across the Pacific. 

Sunday 08/23/20

 

Over at the Light

 

My sister-in-law crafted a surprise rendezvous for my brother down at Sterling Lake today.  A perfect location it was equidistant from their home in Maplewood New Jersey and our perch in New Paltz, NY.  Food was on my mind.  I’d only just broken a four day fast last night and when I imagined the walk around this lake thoughts turned to precisely what would be eaten for lunch.  My father swears by “The Hard Role” deli out on 299, past Lowes and so about thirty minutes before we were to go I ordered number of subs:  a Reuben, a meatball parm sub, an eggplant parm sub, a tuna sub, a smoked turkey sub and a grilled chicken sub. “I’ll take a quarter pound of cole slaw and a quarter pound of potato salad too.”  Indeed, I wanted a few mouth fulls of each of these, though I was ostensibly ordering for a party of seven.   The woman taking my order on the phone kept calling me “honey,” which was disconcerting and pleasant in equal measure.

 

We got a cardboard box full of this food, along with some waters and potato chips and made it down to the boarder of New Jersey in under an hour.  We parked and determined we’d made it first and so when we saw their car pull in we tried planned how it would be we’d surprise my brother.  But as we were tiptoeing over he called out and made clear that he had already been informed. 

 

My nephew is such a wonderful ion of energy.  He’d been here before and suggested that up ahead was a waterfall and beyond that was a tower.  He was right!  Apparently on the drive over he’d rolled down the window and yelled to the lady, next car over at the light that he was off to see his uncle John.  I heard the lady smiled, tightly. 

 

We walked along and talked and made sure he didn’t go tumbling down into the lake with his enthusiasm.  I noticed a sassafras tree and figured that was a fine word to teach him.  We agreed that the leaves looked a bit like elephant ears.  And we found a second tree from which to secure a second leaf just before we rendezvoused with his mom and my girls who’d set up a lovely inlet where we could picnic.  We found a pipe and took some cutlery and banged upon it.  We spied some fish and fed them some bread and after a third sampling of the sub-hoard, (turkey was good, the meatball parm meatballs were too bready and the tuna tasted nice and salty . . . but nothing seemed to rise above "good", to my tongue,) we headed out to find a secret path.  How lovely to tap-route into a four year-old’s energy.  

 

On our ride home my wife agreed to drive.  I was keen for a bit of reading and a nap.  I got sleepy, immediately, and then couldn’t sleep when I tried, over and over.  The GPS took my wife up to 87 but then insisted she proceed on to Route 6, which takes you over towards West Point along the river.  She followed and went through a few rounds abouts and suddenly realized she’d done an enormous, useless circle and we repeated the whole ride up Route 6 once again.  We found a pet store in Newburgh eventually and got some meal worms for the older one’s Gecko 'Barak.'  And once we were home, I talked the older one at first and the little one eventually to join me as we powered through completing a jigsaw puzzle that has sat on our table for eight weeks or more ill-completed.  The Mrs. had put out an ultimatum that it needed to be finished by Sunday . . .  or else.  We listened to the Beatles “Second Album” all the tunes of which: “You Really Got a Hold on Me” and “Mr. Postman,” my daughters recognized.  I had earlier sent a vinyl copy of the disk on to my whom we saw today nephew.  It should arrive in a few days.  Like I managed to with my daughter’s, I’m hoping to create a Beatle soundscape for him that will always be a safe place to return to and commune with the, there with great friends who formed the best band ever. 

Saturday 08/22/24

A Rough Notion Before

 

Yesterday, my wife and I both accompanied my daughter out to her babysitting gig.  She was starting a bit later in the morning and we all drove out together.  I noticed it first.  The tenor of conversation was completely different.  My wife and then I were peppering our older daughter with questions and largely answering them ourselves.  She was in the back.  “No.”  She did not want to play her tunes, the way we normally would have.  The precious atmosphere wherein my older one and I chat about what she’s thinking had been compromised in this three-way dynamic and she’d reverted to one syllable grunts. 

 

I drew everyone’s attention to this.  Everyone agreed, that the ride was very different when there were only two people in the car.  Whatever topic we introduced seemed forced and fell flat.  Not surprisingly, when we dropped her off at work and continued on, things improved for our duet.  “Can I show you the reservoir, I mentioned the other day?”  “Yes.  Sure.”  We drove out on to the Ashokan Reservoir at a crossing I hadn’t seen before and parked where it said: “no parking” and considered the remarkable Slide Mountain peak there, above the waterway.  Later I pulled the car over at a small building that was apparently the sight of a school which the naturalist John Burroughs once taught it. 

 

Burroughs was born in Roxbury, New York on the other side of this peak, there in Delaware County, New York in 1837.  I don’t think I’ve ever been to Delaware County in my life.  Why they even have a town named Delhi there in Delaware County.  There must be a story behind that.  One day, surely.  Boroughs was a chum of Walt Whitman and the great poet apparently encouraged Boroughs to put more time into his nature writing.  Eventually, he did. 

 

Flash ahead one-hundred years and I am finishing up the wonderful series of autobiographical essays, entitled: “A Long Way Home” by the late, great Claude McKay.  I can’t think of anyone I’d rather spend the morning with.  He’s is Provence and then he’s off to Morocco, anticipating “Romance in Marseille” which he wrote at this time though it ended up becoming lost in the archives for fifty years.  I had a rough notion before Covid struck that I might take the family to Spain by way of Morocco this summer.  We had to settle for the Ashokan Reservoir and Middlebury Vermont, instead.  But McKay there, listening to lutes, and ordering a goat slaughtered to feed a guest, somewhere outside of Fez, where he was stationed, away from everyone and everything so he could write and it has rekindled my curiosity.  It wasn’t long before Paul Bowles and Randy Weston would arrive there as well. 

Friday 08/21/20

 

From A Rough Trod

 

Barak Obama spoke to the nation last night.  How fine it was to hear him once again.  I think he made a speech about a month back, during the peak of Black Lives Matter protests, that was just fine.  But last night was different.  It was the Obama we were all mesmerized by when he first ran.  Last night, it was as though his legacy was on the line. The constitutional law professor reminded the country and indeed, he reminded me that the constitution was written as a mechanism to strive towards betterment.  The document was a testimony to imperfection and an opportunity for continuous reflection and refinement. Right.  I knew this.  A living experiment, an institutionalized revolutionary vehicle. 

 The bar was rather high.  High mark set, in my opinion by his remarkable wife, two nights earlier.  Michelle was so clear, and plausible and positive in what she had to say.  It was a like a good friend, welcoming you inside from a rough trod in the elements.  There’s a towel.  Go take a shower.  Wash all that dirt and noise from off your third eye.  Now come sit down, let’s have a talk.  We gave Don the benefit of the doubt.  We all wished him as well, as we could.  As one columnist in the Washington Post suggested, Michelle went high, right for the jugular. 

 

Barack Obama took the baton from his wife two nights later and ran like the wind was gusting up behind him.  It put to shame, of course, the petulant posturing that the current president’s engagements with the nation amount to.  But it was well beyond the reach of anyone else in the Democratic camp either.  The forty-fourth president once again made hope seem audacious, made it clear once again that moving the nation forward was always laborious and always sprang up in reaction to something horrible and imperfect.  The Greeks had a Pericles and the Romans had Cicero,  Out there among our three-hundred-and-fifty- some-odd million souls we do have someone who can speak to us the way the ancients were once spoken to.  He was, and is singular in that regard. 

I don’t know if anyone else were thinking of Pete Townsend and Jimi Hendrix last night.  I for one drifted back to the Monterey Pop Festival of 1967.  To hear Townsend describe it he and Hendrix almost slugged one another over who was to follow who at the big event.  Townsend put his foot down and said” “I am not following you and that’s it!”  Hendrix apparently played some remarkable guitar as was his wont and then stated: “If I have to follow you, I’m pulling out all the stops.”  I refer you “Rock Me Baby” and the “Wild Thing” finale.  But it struck me that I would not want to have to be Kamala Harris and go on after Barack Obama.  She did wonderfully.  She’s not perfect and neither is the system.  She has a chance, to occupy this role and fill out a vision for something bigger than then the sum of what she’s been thus far to get to this place.  But we did have a singularly remarkable figure in the forty-fourth president, which I suspect we are unlikely to see again, for a long while.

 

Thursday, 08/20/20