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epigenetic consequences of Reagan's tax cuts
Saturday, December 16 2017
location: Room 227, Silverado Golf Resort, Napa, California
First thing today, Gretchen and I went over to the cottage-like unit Gretchen's parents were staying in (#217) and had a makeshift brunch consisting mostly of baked goods (both savory and sweet) she'd bought yesterday at Timeless Coffee in Oakland. Since I'm not much into sweet foods (though in the morning they can occasionally serve as a meal), I got the lion's share of the potato & sausage empanadas. There was also coffee, made (as always at hotels in this part of the world) by Keurig robots.
Later Gretchen's father, Gretchen, and I all went across campus to Holly's room to give her the wedding gift I'd made, that seasonally-appropriate copper pipe menorah. We'd wrapped it as best we could, though it still had little copper feet coming out of the bottom. On the walk back, we inspected a set of pools (one was heated, one was not) and investigated the bike rental options, which were managed by an automated system of credit-card-operated locks.
At some point Gretchen and I went into Silverado's main mansion and sat for a time on leather club chairs in front of a seemingly-eternal fire in the fireplace. Gretchen looked around at the place: the uninspired decor, the big screens above the bar tuned to ongoing mainstream sporting events, and the slightly-sad white people hunched over their late-morning martinis, all of it overlooking a fucking golf course, and declared Silverado to be "the WASPiest place" she had "ever been."
For lunch, Gretchen's parents, Gretchen and I drove south into Napa proper to go to a burger placed called Gott's Roadside, a fairly vegan-unfriendly burger joint that offered a rare restaurant-only faux-meat patty called The Impossible Burger. First, though, we had a walk through the Oxbow Market, a vibrant multi-vendor space full of artisinal foods and people doing hour-inappropriate drinking. I was feeling good from a dose of kratom tea, and it made the place seem extra exciting (and perhaps even inspiring). I was also ravenously hungry, though sadly a swarm of locusts had recently passed through and eaten most of the free samples. While there, we bought some handsome-looking loaves of bread for tomorrow's makeshift brunch.
The problem with vegan-unfriendly restaurants like Gott's is that they're perfectly willing to "veganize" anything, though this always means subtracting expensive components and charging the same amount for the difference. The cashier tried to encourage us to do this, but we went the other way, starting with a basic burger and adding items to it (though, of course, these additional items increased the burgers' prices). I could add avocado and pickeled jalapeños, but for some reason the damn mushrooms had to be sauteed in butter. In addition to burgers, we got fries, though sadly half of these were sweet potato fries, which I do not like even when they are spicy. For a beverage, I was the only one to go alcoholic, and got a bottle of the reliably-excellent (at least on the West Coast) Ballast Point Sculpin IPA. Naturally, when we sat down to eat our burgers, we discovered our order had been screwed up. I got the avocados I wanted, but the jalapeños they'd charged extra for were utterly absent. And Gretchen's mother's burger featured lots of pickles, a condiment she hates and had repeatedly gotten assurance would not be added. As for the burgers, though, they really were excellent.
Back at the resort, Gretchen and I eventually decided to try the pool. Everything at Silverado has unimaginative WASPy names like "The Grill," so of course the athletic center with the biggest pool was called "The Spa." But when we tested the water temperatures, they seemed a bit too cold for this blustery day. Even the hot tub was about 15 degrees colder than it should've been. So instead we went into the workout room to play around on the various machines. I'd never spent any amount of time in a gymn with machines designed for the workout of specific muscle groups, so, what the hell? It was a when-in-Rome kind of thing. (Indeed, Gretchen even thought it would be fun to hit balls at the driving range to see what this widespread "golf" obsession was all about.) I stuck mostly to machines designed to exercise muscles in the lower half of my body so I could dick around on my phone at the same time. Not surprisingly, I discovered that I have the greatest lifting power in my legs; I went well over 300 pounds on the seated leg press (which isn't surprising, given that I can walk thousands of feet carrying my own weight in firewood on a backpack frame, at least when I'm in shape).
[REDACTED]
Holly's wedding came at 5:30pm sharp, in a tented (and heated) outdoor space adjacent to the mansion. Gretchen had brought the wrong bra for the dress she'd be wearing, and just before the wedding, I tried to remedy the situation with a stapler borrowed from the front desk, but I couldn't get a staple through the kevlar or whatever obdurate material that otherwise girlie-girl dress had been made from. This delay meant we were among the last seated for the wedding.
It was a very conventional (and well-produced) wedding, with much more Jewish content than expected. There was a chuppah, the breaking of the glass, and almost as much Hebrew as English. Holly is Jewish (though her father hadn't been until conversion). Her new husband is Catholic, and, because Holly has an Irish surname, he'd probably initially thought she was too. But every wedding is the product of negotiations between the families, and evidently Jewish traditions won out. In a nod to the groom's religious traditions, a Catholic priest gave a brief somewhat-ecumentical benediction. The ceremony was traditional enough for there to be talk of family and the having of children, though there was no musty stipulation that Holly "obey" her new husband. She did take his name, though, just like back in 1959.
The wedding was over well before I expected it to, and then suddenly everyone was drinking. Staff came by with flutes of champagne on a tray, though I soon abandoned mine for a hot toddy Gretchen fetched me from the bar. That really wasn't to my liking either, and I graduated to a gin and tonic. Gretchen was being her usual social butterfly while I felt like a wallflower in need of a wall despite all the drinking I was doing. I struck up a few conversations, mostly with Holly's sisters and one of their husbands. They'd been the bridesmaids and were all dressed in a festive maroon, the same color Gretchen had chosen (indeed, she was acting as a de facto bridesmaid herself).
At one point I turned to Gretchen's father (who is about six inches shorter than my five foot ten) and said that I'd never seen so many tall women before. The women were tall, but so too were the men. These were all members of the groom's party, both family and friends. I felt like I was looking at the epigenetic consequences of Reagan's tax cuts and the flourishing of the upper middle class.
During dinner, we found ourselves at a table with mostly older second-cousins-once-removed from both the maternal side of Holly and Gretchen's family and from the family of the groom. The woman to my right was a San Francisco native and some relation to the groom, and when I mentioned that I was vegan, she said she didn't eat any meat, "only chicken and fish." For the main course, there was both a beef option and a fish option, though there was also a vegan option: a concoction of quinoa, rice, and tiny intact turnips (an intact top attached to a marble-sized underground tuber). It sounded like the sort of thing a chef would prepare for vegans as a passive-aggressive afterthought, though it was unexpectedly flavorful. There was still the dismay of sitting next to people who only ate half their fist-sized cube of beef, consigning the remainder to the landfill.
At a wedding like this in an industrial wedding factory, things happen on a tight schedule. The Hora was an early activity, interrupting the first part of dinner, and both Holly and her husband were hoisted up on chairs and carried around until Holly wanted to be returned to the safety of Planet Earth. Later, there were a few touching speeches about the bride, groom, and how they'd met. Most poignant of all were the words given by Holly's father, whose relationship with his daughter has always been incredibly close (he and her mother wife actually moved to the Bay Area when she decided to attend college there). He actually said his purpose in this life was to be Holly's father, which is a terribly profound thing to say (and, perhaps inadvertently, a heavy weight for a daughter to bear).
There was the bride and groom's first dance, father-daughter, and mother-son dances, the last two of which would have been unfathomable in my family (but seemed to sort of work with these folks). They'd done their homework and actually knew how to dance. Gretchen turned to me and said something about how she wished I'd been willing to take dance classes so we could perform like that. I could see her point; dancing is another social skill, like knowing how to play the guitar. But I'd rather know Javascript.
Eventually dinner wound down, the cake was cut, and people started dancing (as they always do). It surprising to see all these youngish adults, all of them born circa 1987, dancing and singing along to songs from the late 1970s and early 1980s. "Sweet Caroline" was especially pleasing to this crowd, the DJ silencing the music so the crowd could pump their fists and shout for the "wa-wa-wa" that comes between "Sweet Caroline" and "Good times never seemed so good." There was surprising little music from the last ten year. "Uptown Funk" made an appearance, as did Icona Pop's brilliant "I Love It," and some square-dance hip-hop mashup I remember hearing on the radio, but not much more than that. As with everything at this perfectly-executed wedding, the DJ excelled at his craft, talking over the music in a radio-friendly voice when necessary or seamlessly transitioning from one song into the next. I danced a little bit, though not as much as I did at past weddings. I'm getting too old for this shit, and I'd also managed to avoid getting all that intoxicated. I didn't want to be the drunk guy at cousin Holly's wedding. Still operating on East-Coast time, we headed back to our room well before the night was over.
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