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postponed defecating until Monday
Thursday, August 17 2006
Jacob is one of Gretchen's friends whom she met years ago when she was sharing at office with him in Manhattan and then it turned out he lived in Park Slope. Later he moved to Los Angeles just before Gretchen got into contact with me (when I was living in West Los Angeles). Jacob went on to play several rounds of basketball with my housemate John and serve in various important behind-the-scenes roles in a number of indy films directed by his brother. He's on the East Coast now for various family-related goings on in Connecticut, including a wedding. Today he and his freshly-married wife Kate drove up to visit us. Originally their plans were to stay for only a few hours but they ended up spending the night.
We did all the usual guest things. Gretchen cooked a cornbread upside-down cake and a raspberry lemon tart which looked like raspberries and taste like lemon, which, as I pointed out at the time, was like a movie that runs dark foreboding music over a love scene. But I'm getting ahead of myself. First we drank a bottle of white wine, which Jacob avoided because alcohol makes the soles of his feet itchy. (The first time I heard him say this, I thought I heard the name of the famous Italian somethingist, Sozefmifiticci.) We did this on the south porch, which would normally be lousy with mosquitos, but due to the drought there were none. Instead we were harassed by famished Yellow Jacket hornets who were interested solely in our wine and fruit juice. Later we walked around a mid-length loop of the Stick Trail system, where I obsevered a number of wilted Black Birches. Evidently this is how they respond to drought. All the usual streamlets (such as the Chamomile) were bone dry.
Later we all went out to the Bear, the fancy restaurant in Bearsville (just to the west of Woodstock). We brought all the dogs, including Wilke, the tiny terrier mutt belonging to Jacob and Kate. The "big" dogs had to stay back in the car, although Wilke got to sit with us in the outside patio area, just above the drought-stricken Sawkill Creek. (There's also a new semi-enclosed outside area, the scraps of which helped supply my garage renovation, but it didn't suit our mood.) Wilke was well behaved, though he seemed to have a racist mistrust of dark-skinned people, including the cardboard-colored woman who resupplied our bread and water. Jacob and Kate are good people, with that dry sense of humor, earthiness, and congenital bleakness that makes for satisfying conversations. Kate, for example, volunteered a story about a mutual friend of Jacob and Gretchen who had stayed with her brand new boyfriend one weekend and, because he never left her alone for even five minutes, postponed defecating until that Monday.
The news of the supposed confession of JonBenet Ramsey's killer has me wondering: will the real killer of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman be stepping forward next?
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