White Heath Asters. I

Raining out there.  And in a manner that is wonderfully distinct to our back yard, which views out across the valley to the Gunks, the sopping cloud, low to the ground is passing swiftly, directly overhead and soon will be gone, as the blue sky behind it is gradually revealed.  It’s been like this all day.  It was sunny when I went for my bike ride and there was drizzle when I’d returned.  The sun returned and then moments ago, while my little daughter was out jogging a deluge moved down and in.  Enjoying watching the resolution and glad that I’m inside. 

Out on the trail, second week of October and still, this late in the year there are new things blooming.  I saw what I’d identified as Calico Asters, a lovely purple flower that seemed to be growing everywhere.  Today I vowed to pick a few on the way home and when I came to the stretch right before Cedar Lane I parked my bike to see about picking a few Asters. 

 

There were a big group of white flowers and as I approached, I took note of the fact that they were many bees, darting about the flowers.  It felt oafish and a bit dangerous to go up and shoo them all away so I could take one of their last pollination points of the season.  Besides, this didn’t look like the Calico Aster.  But my app couldn’t identify.  Further up the trail I stopped precisely where I’d seen all those purple petals but as I got close they all seemed a more white than they did purple.  How did that happen?  Not so many bees on these and my app was able to confirm that these were White Heath Asters.  I plucked ten stems or so and they are now sitting in a faux jade vase on my desk.  Fine looking little wildflowers, these asters.  Is that common knowledge that they are rather late bloomers?

My friend and I have started a little playlist on Spotify.  He throw up two tunes and I comment and return the favor.  He put on some beautiful Ethiopian jazz I hadn’t heard in a while:  Hailu Mergia.  I think we both learned about this particular member of the Abyssinian galaxy, through the wonderful WFMU DJ, Trouble and her “This is the Modern World” program.  I seem to remember getting dressed in rather tight AirBnB in Mong Kok with a colleague or two, enjoying this gent and they both asked me just what it was I was listening to.  We don’t consider a music library the same way when we have access to everything, always.  Glad for the reminder to spend time with this gent and that time in Hong Kong when it felt like the present. 

 

 

 

Wednesday, 10/07/20

No. He's Not Returning

I thought I was cool.  I’d prepared for this morning’s ride.  Leaving our house at 7:45AM, I still had a final ten minutes or so of a weekly call with six or seven different countries.  My little one sat beside me in the driver’s seat listening to tunes in her earbuds.  I wasn’t asked to contribute anything and soon it was over. 

 

We cut off 299 and on to New Paltz Road which is a recently discovered short cut that affords some outstanding fall foliage and I exhaled.  “Right.  Glad to have that done.  So, what’s as going on with Eren?  He turned into a Titan, died and then returned?”  “Yeah.” “Can you explain it a little without giving away the plot?”  “Yeah.”  “So . . . ?”  “So he didn’t really die.”  “Yeah, I get that.  He’s back.”    We went on this way for while.  Me asking questions about is seemingly the single most important thing in her world just now, which I made the time to actually read so we could discuss.  But things were flat. 

 

“Is something going on?”  “Yeah.”  "Right.  Um.  What?” “Levi died.”  “I see.”  Levi is the character from ‘Attack on Titan’ whom she adores.  “Surely he’ll be back?  I mean there is definitely precedent for people dying and returning in that series.”  “No.  He’s not returning.  It’s like I lost my boyfriend.”  “I see.”  This, then was why she’d been so sullen.

When I returned home I thought I had the scoop on things and shared my insight with my wife, who calmly informed me that last night, after I’d gone to bed, my daughter had come down shrieking, devastated, that “her boyfriend” had died.  Apparently when her older sister, who has a corporeal boyfriend tried to cheer her up the younger one queried: “How would you feel if you lost Joseph?”  The older one rightly pointed out that they weren’t comparable seeing as how one was a real person and the other a cartoon creation, but she wasn’t having it.  This was a body-blow.  I was merely dealing with the morning after. 

Tuesday, 10/06/20

Life About Returning To

 

Driving home from having dropped my daughter off at school I got yapping with a friend who also, recently repatriated back from China.  He’s down in the Philadelphia area.  We gasped incredulous at Trump’s latest foibles, talked about deals, talked about kids and I took the car up and off the west side of the Mid-Hudson Bridge, following 44/55 North I took the first exit off, Haviland which heads all the way down back under the bridge to a spot I’d never seen before, named the Johnson-Iorio Memorial Park, named after two soldiers who died in Vietnam in 1967 and 1968 respectively.  There I sat at considered the river and talked to my pal. 

I drove a while down Oakes Road and up along Mile Hill Road. I was conscious of a phone battery that was only four-percent charged, before this call started.  But before I could say anything he mentioned that he had to go and we agreed to talk again, before too long.  Some dirge-like Gloria Coates which had sounded odd, somber out biking on the rail trail yesterday was not what I was looking for just now, riding through the countryside along Red Top Road, heading back towards the intersection with 299, I switched it over to the radio, WFMU.  A DJ whose name I didn’t catch was playing some old seventies country boogie-woogie and I didn’t recognize it.  But it caught my ears and fit the scene and later on by the time I drove down my driveway I was informed that this had been Mac Davis.

 

“Uncle Booger Red and Byrdie Nelle” was followed by “Texas in My Rearview Mirror” and I grew more intrigued as he navigated the fine balance between good story telling, bitterness, authenticity and a fine balance between rock and country.  Come to find he’d written songs for Frank Sinatra, Nancy Sinatra, Elvis, and like Carrol King was clearly a fine singer of his own music as well.  And like Buddy Holly he hailed from Lubbock Texas which he’d left behind as soon as he could and then sang the rest of his life about returning to. 

Later in the day when my wife went back to pick up our daughter I was quick to call my pop.  Good man that he is he responded “sure” when I asked him if he’d like to come and help me move a bookcase up from the second garage to the house.  He as over in about ten minutes.  We got one and then another of these beasts up to the study quickly enough.  Grateful, I bid him adieu and dusted the old Beijing dust off the shelves and inserted them into the cases.  My wife and I had moved the first one up yesterday and she didn’t think it worked in the room.  It was too big.  The wrong color.  Now there were three of them in the house.  I took off for a bike ride, before she returned.

Monday, 10/05/20

Redemption With Arm Pit

 

Trying to write iambic pentameter and share it with a friend.  He’s to try and write me back, in kind.  I've now written him with one such effort and he's replied with his own. Fluid.  His made sense.  I'd suspected as much.  My effort followed the rhythmic and rhyming rules well enough, but the result had no real grace. 

 

Moved one of my old book shelves up to this office today.  Thirty minutes worth of taped cardboard removal led me to the point of considering just how to move this enormous book frame up from the lower garage.  I’d originally considered a wheel barrow but settled upon the idea of a hand truck.  The big shelf  fit on the hand truck easily enough and we got it to the front door relatively quickly.  From there a considerable amount of maneuvering was required but before long we’d managed to move it up to this study.  They are large and crowd the room. My wife told me this many times.   I’m snot sure how many more will fit but if it were up to me there’d be at least one more in this study. 

Yesterday evening we took some stakes and popped jack ‘o’ lanterns on top of them and pulled out an old tee shirt or two that I loved I their day but were now simply beyond redemption with arm pit holes.  We populated a little village of strange pumpkin children on stakes, and with the spikes and the shirts it certainly looked creepy from the trail. 

Today when I walked down that someone had taken one of the pumpkins and pushed it down over the stake.  The end-game is to be creepy so I didn’t mind on the gesture on the one hand, though I was intrigued that someone felt they should walk up and behave that way, as if my gesture was a provocation, which I suppose it was.  I rearranged a few things for what I told myself was the last time.  If they fall or are messed with again, so be it.  They are meant to be a temporal horror gesture, not a holy crèche.

Sunday, 10/04/20

You Both Understand It

The Wallkill River follows its own logic after passing New Paltz by.  After the point where the rail trail crosses Route Seven, the river turns and turns again, forming a dramatic S before continuing on its way, which is where Thirty-two crosse over it. My wife and I were coming back from visiting the Kalleco Nursery for the first time and she asked to see the Coppersea Distillery.  I was certain I could take a right off Thirty-two and get there but each time road proved a cul de sac as they came upon the river.  Eventually I figured out you needed to go up into New Paltz, cross the bridge and then cut over to Seven.  My biker’s geography and the one formed by driving were finally being sewn into place.

 

Just was in the garage sawing points on to stakes so we can bang them into the earth more easily.  When the girls come back from running in a fifteen-minutes or so, we’re going to carve multiple small pumpkins and then find some place in the yard, perhaps down close to the trail to bang them all in.  Unlike a normal Jack ‘o’ lantern, where a candle would need to sit, we need to cut the bottom out and create a throat to rest the head on.  Strange haunted gathering of pumpkin heads, for no apparent reason, that the forest will slowly reclaim. 

 

The President has Covid 19.  An overweight septuagenarian, he is necessarily a high-risk profile.  “Get Well Mr. President.”  The New York Times editorial summarized it thoughtfully.  As a fellow human being, as another father, I wish you health and a speedy recover.  I do.  And it is appropriate that we wish you well.  You have not been well.  You have been anything but well for some time now.

 

I earnestly wish you good health and a speedy recovery so that you can face defeat in thirty-days with both feet planted on the ground, fully cognizant, in possession of all of your bombast so that you can taste pubic defeat and feel the echo.  This is important for all of us.  We must soundly defeat you so that you we and you both understand it.  

Have become hooked, I’m afraid.  I’m in the second large book of “Lone Wolf and Cub.”  I’m coming to think of it like a Robert Van Gulik look at medieval China in that Dutch diplomat’s  Judge Dee series.  I carry around the tannic from steeping in so much odd Confucian, Shinto, Buddhist, Bushido cross cutting currents.  We move swiftly, like the blade from one justice tension to another.  Very glad to be reading.  Though I don’t know if anyone else will join me.

 

 

 

Saturday, 10/03/20

By Titans Was Construed

 

I started early this week, resuming consumption on Thursday night rather than my default Friday at 5:00PM.  A guest, from Vassar, whom my wife has come to know.  Someone from Shandong, near Binzhou, the heart of Qi Guo.   And it was grand to just sit and talk for a while in Chinese.  Her English was fine but so is my mandarin and we shared some ideas about her work and I noticed that I needed to restrain myself from going on and on and about my wife’s life there in the place where she was from.

 

And my dear old friend from undergraduate years arrived as well.  What a wonderful friend she is.  I was at one and the same time so proud to introduce her to my daughters and have them consider her.  My older one is quite capable of crystalizing the moment and speaking with gravity about all that she’s up to and this can’t but make a dad happy. 

 

This morning I should have set the alarm for 3:00AM.  Befuddled, and late I set it for 3:30AM.  That was when we’d had a revised call last week.  “Sorry.  Sorry.”  And I ran through my updates, though the Greater Confucian Sphere was in full ketou to the moon gods and the mid-autumn festival.  Not much to report on.  And when the call was done I sat in the toilet and red the next book, four mini books, really of my daughter’s favorite manga: “Attack on Titan.” 

 

Two calls later I got my little one up and we drove off to her school on the east side of the Hudson.  She was late and grumpy and monosyllabic.  I insisted we play the “Attack on Titan” theme song which she was immediately excited about.  I then began to pepper her with questions about who was this character?  Why did that girl behave that way?  Like chucking bread into a pond, she went swiftly to the bait and we had a good multisyllabic chat about how it was that this world besieged by titans was construed. 

Later my dad, surprisingly pooped out of our hike, on account of the rain.  There’s no rain in the forest, beneath the canopy.  Anyway, I went along and walked for a while until I was able to catch one and then another bluff on the main carriage trail.  And they were lovely and I had my binoculars but I must say they are probably a damn sight smarter to view from in the winter version of this trail, when there are no leaves there on the trees.  I shall have to return, perhaps with my dad, and see. 

Friday 10/02/20

Who Are Looking Shambolic

If a neighbor asks something once you can assume he’ll ask about it again later.  My neighbor up the hill is in his late eighties.  He has a lovely porch up there, above our property which he can’t see.  He is asking if I would be willing to cut the right arm off a beautiful white pine on our property and I don’t want to.  I hedge.  I’ll speak with the wife and get back to you on that. 

 

But this time, as he did last time, he asks about why China doesn’t have its act together.  And this time I’m not caught by surprise: “George, it is China that does have its act together.  They are down to single digit cases in a population five times our own.  They have addressed the situation and credibly managed it.  It is us who are looking shambolic George.  “Is that right?  Really?  They are down to single digit cases? Well isn’t that something?”

Tomorrow morning at 8:45AM we’re going to have a walk through Fanny Reese Park.  It was just the other morning, we were all heading over the Mid-Hudson Bridge when we turned right and saw mist over the verdant hill side along the west bank of the Hudson just about to turn color.  That stretch of protected forest was, in fact, Fanny Reese park, named after the naturalist benefactress of the last century.  Today, I cheated and took a left up 9W and went south to see the trail head. 

Real big Sassafras tree there lording over the parking lot, that has all but completely turned Halloween orange.  I walked up to the map they had but there were two people standing there, appreciating the map, talking animatedly.  This being Covid I walked along, further in than I’d originally intended and finally turned around and came back to find the other couple off, down some other trail.  Well, now I’m ready, when we park here, me, my wife, my dad, tomorrow morning and head in.  “Guys, let’s take the white trial. That’s the one with the real views.”

Thursday, 10/01/20