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two strangers discover they are vegans
Thursday, May 1 2008
Today both Gretchen and I had shifts of work at prisons which we get to by driving south down US 209. Gretchen's was at Eastern Correctional Facility while mine was twenty minutes futher southwest in Woodbourne. Gretchen had the idea that we should car pool because she's a crazy cardigan-wearing freak who would happily vote for Jimmy Carter and help him reinstall solar panels on the roof of the White House if given half a chance. So I dropped her off on 209, at the road leading to Eastern, and continued on to Woodbourne.
Whenever I'm doing work at Woodbourne, I always get assigned a guard who sits around and does nothing for the several hours it takes me to do what I need to do. Today's guard was an older veteran who was generally unfamiliar with the wing of the prison I was working in. He also didn't know the policy whereby prisoner-students are supposed to be evicted whenever I'm in their computer lab. This allowed me to talk to some of them and find out which computers were experiencing network problems, which was essential information I needed for doing what I'd come to do. Some of the cables I'd crimped during my last visit had proved unreliable, a result of the fact that I'd used a cheap, evidently worn-out crimper. I needed to know which cables needed to have their crimps topped-off by a brand new crimper I'd bought just for today's visit.
Eventually the sour puss who runs Woodbourne's educational unit showed up and shooed out the students. Once Mr. Buzzkill was gone, the guard baby-sitting me seemed a little unnerved by the fact that he hadn't known himself to shoo out the prisoner-students. I reassured him with a shrug and said, "The policy's always changing."
Unfortunately the room's fileserver was configured in a way that made it impossible for me to create user accounts, so I had to abandon a project I had to provide a way for prisoner-students to start keeping their work on the server instead of the individual workstations.
At the end of the module, as I was being escorted back to freedom, our entourage was joined by a woman who was also somehow part of the Bard program. I asked if she knew my wife, Gretchen, who should now be well-known by anyone working in the program. The woman claimed she'd gone to Oberlin with Gretchen. "I went to Oberlin with Gretchen too," I said. The woman didn't recognize my name, which was just as well, since when I was at Oberlin I was known mostly for my deliberately-offensive illustrations of penises.
Gretchen was out in front of Eastern Correctional Facility when I rolled up, and we headed for home. I was hungry and thought maybe we'd be stopping at the Egg's Nest in High Falls. But Gretchen had remembered that Skate Time (the big roller rink on 209) has an adults-only night on Thursdays. So we stopped there. It was only about 4:00 in the afternoon and the only people there were a bunch of skater brats shredding on the ramps in the skateboard section of the building. There was one lonely employee (a skateboarding dude) running the whole place. He rented us our skates, collected our money, and made our veggie burgers and fries. While they were on the grill, Gretchen struck up a conversation with another employee/owner who had just shown up. She didn't look the least bit out of the ordinary, but when Gretchen praised her for the several vegetarian options on the grill menu, she claimed to be vegan and to have read Skinny Bitch. There are few interpersonal moments as powerful as when two strangers discover that they are both vegans, so I had to eat my veggie burger alone.
Out in the rink, Gretchen and I were the only skaters for a good half hour or so. The guy doing all the jobs had put on music for us to skate to, and judging by what it was, he either accurately guessed our ages, or else our formative years coincided with the period during which all roller skating music was developed. Tunes included Madonna's "Lucky Star," Elton John's "Don't Go Breaking My Heart," and a very familiar song by Lionel Richie.
This was only the second time in my life I'd ever gone roller skating, so I still felt like a gross amateur as I tried to develop forward momentum on the eight wheels beneath me. I generally did this by forcing my legs apart and then together, but it seemed to take a lot more energy than it should have, particularly given the tepid velocities I was able to achieve.
After awhile an older couple showed up, and I wondered what they were doing there given that generally we represented the ceiling demographic for the place. But then they got out in the rink, and Jesus, they really knew how to skate. They could get up on one foot and do things one normally only associates with Olympic figure skating. I felt like a complete clod in their presence, though it wasn't long before I'd struck up a conversation with the old dude. I quickly qualified my pathetic performance by saying this was only the second time I'd ever gone roller skating. He chuckled and said I was doing well, and then gave me some pointers, the most important of which was to not keep staring at my feet. Once I'd stopped doing that, the efficiency of my skating improved dramatically and I no longer felt as if I was rolling on the immutable vectors defined by rails. Later the female half of the older duo tried to teach me how to push off with one foot, but it was way beyond me.
By this point we'd skated for about an hour, so we called it a day, turning in our skates and heading home.
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