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TownOfHurley.com
Sunday, November 4 2007
It doesn't make any sense to go through the bother of assembling and advertising a yard sale if one doesn't have it run for both days of a weekend. So today was day two of Penny and David's yardsale. Gretchen joined it early as I continued my ongoing solar panel installation project, which today consisted mostly of insulating the new plumbing. I've tried several different techniques for insulating pipe in outdoor conditions and all of them would have to be considered experimental (the experiments take years to complete). Today I introduced two new experiments. One new insulation technique was just to use conventional foam pipe wrapped in aluminized tape to keep out water and sunlight. The other technique used fiberglass pipe insulation wrapped in the clear plastic tape used to seal greenhouses.
Later I joined the ongoing yard sale, which was experiencing less foot traffic than it had yesterday, although Anastasia did manage to sell $150 worth of golf clubs. Today I'd brought my chainsaw, which I used to harvest some road shoulder firewood near Penny and David's house as well as some down trees in the forest around their house. Forest clutter offends Penny's designerly æsthetic, and she's eager for me to cut up and haul away all the trunks that have discontinued being vertical.
At some point friend-of-the-household Donna
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showed up with her young son Ethan, who had just turned six. To say Ethan could benefit from a Ritalin prescription might be an understatement, and Gretchen soon headed for home, leaving me behind with the others. In celebration of Ethan's birthday, we went out in the driveway and Donna launched six Roman candles (which are illegal in New York State). At some point I made the observation that Ethan had been born after 9Eleven, and (apropos of nothing) "doesn't this mean the terrorists have won?" "What?" said Donna.
Later Anastasia was rough housing with Ethan all around the house, which seemed to encouraged his boundless little kid energy. He did settle down a little at one point enough to ask Penny to draw a dinosaur in one of his sketch books. The book used a strange modern kind of medium where pens seemed to leave a nearly-invisible wet mark on the paper that quickly assumed a vibrant primary color, probably through some sort of chemical reaction. Penny wasn't happy with the sauropod she drew from memory, so then Ethan had me draw a few dinosaurs. So I drew a Tyranosaurus, a Triceratops, and a Pterodactyl, all from memory, and they weren't half bad either. In retrospect it seemed that these command art performances were Ethan's way of "quizzing" his new adult friends to see if they were worthy friends. In a similar vein, I later quizzed Ethan about whether or not he understood irony. That concept was a little advanced for him, but he and I did later bond over the labeling of the various parts of a shark I drew (again, from memory).
Amusingly, Donna didn't seem to care when Ethan used or spelled out obscenities, but she gave him a stern reprimand after he'd asked me how to spell "shut" and "up" and then accidentally read the resulting phrase off the page. Evidently "shut up" has to be taboo for a kid that age.
Ethan also knew that a single raised middle finger was taboo, and this lead me to tell the story of how, when I was his age, I learned this. (A kid had told me on the playground, but I hadn't believed him and so kept both middle fingers raised during music class until the music teacher told me to stop and then I knew the kid had been right.) Penny and I then told Ethan that one can instead raise three fingers and say "read between the lines." I also told Ethan about the "hang loose" symbol made with a hand extending a pinky and a thumb and rotating back and forth a few degrees, a sign he remembered to make later when I said goodbye.
Despite my preferences, not all of my interactions with Ethan were intellectual. He kept climbing on me, shooting at me with an LED flashlight, and wanting to be swung around. At one point I had him dangling behind my back when Anastasia (who was in an unusually frisky mood) punched me in the stomach. She didn't hit me hard, but it was enough for me to reflexively drop Ethan onto the floor, but he wasn't hurt.
Later, in one of many incidents of excessive childish exuberance, Ethan went flying through the air and knocked over a mid-century-modern lamp, destroying its incandescent bulb. "My bad!" Ethan declared, and his use of this slightly-dated idiom made him sound oddly mature.
The presence of a kid Ethan's age has the effect of draining all the adult juices out of a gathering, and I could see why Gretchen wouldn't want to be around for that. But I actually had a good time.
A second reason for Gretchen's early departure was that Penny and David were cooking a huge hormone-addled chicken for dinner, and there was really nothing else to eat except for it and the chicken-juice-soaked vegetables that had stewed beneath it. Gretchen actually placed me in something of a damned-if-I-do/damned-if-I-don't situation by guilt-tripping me about the eating of chicken while also wanting me to stay for dinner so she could have some "alone time" back at the house.
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