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when friends settle down
Monday, September 23 2002
setting: Park Slope, Brooklyn, New York
Today we were supposed to drive up to Hurley for the inspection of the new house, which will take place tomorrow morning.
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Gretchen borrowed Ray and Nancy's Sunbird for the trip, and this allowed us to bring Sally along. We stopped in New Paltz on the way for a surprise drop-in visit of Kristen Ma$$on, but when we got to her house (a "raised ranch" sandwiched in the narrow strip of land between the Thruway and N. Putt Corner's Road), nobody was home. So we just walked in and looked around. At about this time Kristen's housemate Melissa showed up, momentarily startled by the presence of unexpected guests and an excitable mid-sized black dog in her kitchen. We sat around in the kitchen talking for awhile, mostly about how sad it is when friends settle down with their boyfriends, have kids, add decks to their houses, and start making SUV payments, never to be seen or heard from again. Though married to an absentee Marine (potential cannon fodder for the distractionary war), Melissa is so sure she doesn't want to follow that dreary path that she has had her tubes tied.
From New Paltz, Gretchen and I drove directly to Katie's new house in Saugerties. Since we'd last visited Katie a couple weeks ago, she and her boyfriend Louis had moved into a rambling secluded house on the shore of a small pond. Aside from the shit-yellow vinyl siding and persistent smell of sewer gas off the back stoop, it's a lovely place well integrated with the surrounding environs. Nobody gets everything they want in a house they can afford, and the best thing one can hope for is that a house's problems can eventually be remedied.
We drank a little wine out on the back stoop (catching only occasional whiffs of sewer gas) and then drove to a nearby restaurant called The Red Onion. It was a kind of a fancy place with a very deliberate hip-but-elegant interior. Unfortunately, however, the food was mediocre at best. My order of fish and chips was only a few notches better than the vacuum-cleaner-bag-flavored brunch I ate when I was in London. Gretchen later reported similar disappointment with her food.
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