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window and aisle
Saturday, March 24 2018
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, New York, USA
The cleaning jihad that is a necessary prerequisite for leaving on vacation continued today, with vacuuming and even a quick scrub of the bathtub I like to use in the basement (a tub that usually has a pronounced ring, since it's not so disgusting to bathe in a palimpsest of one's own filth). Our housesitters arrived in the late afternoon. They were Z, the woman, and R, her husband or boyfriend. Z said she was a writer and she was pretty in a hippie/earthy way. For his part, R (who said he was an artist) was such an archetype of California surfer burnout that he reminded me of my friend Mark (the guy who shows up every now and then, usually unannounced, carrying a six pack of beer and trying to convince me to turn my greenhouse into a massive marijuana grow operation). Gretchen and I gave the usual rundown of how to run the house and care for the critters, which included instructions on the prednisone that Neville needs to be given for that lump on his arm. R said he was familiar with operating a woodstove, which helped soften the usual anxiety I feel when turning over our house to strangers. Later we took a walk up and down the Farm Road and then a second short walk to the Chamomile and back along the Stick Trail. Gretchen had made a delicious broccoli "cheese" soup as part of her usual vegan outreach. Z & R said they were willing to be vegan in our house, and seemed genuinely interested in veganism as a subject matter. For my part, of course, I found the relentless veganism conversation tiresome. I'm on board with it as a moral choice, but the problem with evangelism is the endless repetition required as different people flow through your life. This is why I could never be a teacher, politician, or guitarist. Ideally, I never want to do, hear, or say the same thing twice.
Happily, occasionally the conversation veered into other subjects, such as Z's ideas for writing projects. Unfortunately, it wasn't necessarily any more pleasant. R had an extremely imprecise way of talking full of verbal tics and stoner weasel words, yet when he actually got specific, what he said was utter nonsense. He started talking, for example, about how some place was a certain wonderful way because of the crystals in the ground; somehow Gretchen managed to change the subject before we revealed our contempt.
We said goodbye to our house sitters and critters and started our drive to the airport. To make a connection to Budapest from London, we had to fly out of JFK, our least-favorite airport. It's not so much that JFK is big, unpleasantly engineered, and slow (though it is all of those things), it's also that it is placed in a sector of the New York City metro area that is particularly difficult to get to from the Hudson Valley.
As we crossed Queens, we listened to a rather disturbing episode of Fresh Air in which a woman blamed antipsychotics for destroying her physical health and taking years off her life even as they made it possible her to function as a reasonably-normal human. If she had to pick between being physically wretched and sane versus physically healthy but a mental mess, she would pick the former. She also talked at length about how mood stabilizers (such as the Celexa that Gretchen takes) has ruined her sex drive and were probably doing other bad things that nobody yet knows about. Gretchen found this disturbing; she herself has noted a marked decrease in her sex drive, and the notion that Celexa might be doing other harmful things was terrifying.
Perhaps the biggest problem with JFK is the expense and ordeal of parking a car there. The official ways to do this are all terrible, so a thriving market of parking businesses have sprung up around the airport to take advantage of the market of people looking for better service at a cheaper price. We've had mixed luck with such businesses in the past (this summer an attempt to park with an off-brand parking service at the beginning of our trip to Uganda had to be abandoned), though the one Gretchen had picked for today had high reviews in Yelp. It was just some guy named Charles on 146th street (or avenue or road) in Springfield Gardens just north of JFK. Gretchen initially navigated us to 146th Street or Avenue or Road that was not the right one, and it was sketchy place where young sketchy men asked us if we'd called the cops as we waited outside our car for Charles to appear. Eventually (over the phone) Charles told us the nature of our error and we found the correct paved passageway numbered 146 (less than a quarter mile away). Charles was a friendly Caribbean guy whose kids were noisily playing videogames in the adjacent house (it was his son's birthday, and he'd just gotten a PlayStation). Charles took us directly to our terminal, and before long we'd made it through security.
Near our gate were several ratty old couches with faded flags (union jacks or stars & stripes) stenciled onto them. That was where we ended up spending most of our time as we waited for our transatlantic flight to Heathrow Airport in London.
The airplane taking us there was a jumbo jet, at least half of which was given over to first and business class seating. Back in coach, there were two aisles and no clusters of seats smaller than three-adjacent. Gretchen had cleverly gotten us a window seat and an aisle seat with an unclaimed seat between us on the hope that the flight would not be full and that seat would be empty. When the cabin doors were shut and that seat was still unoccupied, we high-fived and squealed with glee. Gretchen ended up mostly watching movies during our seven hour flight, while I mostly read parts of a book (I've gone back to Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O'Neil). As always with big international flights, the wine was free, and there were two free meals, both of which Gretchen had arranged to be vegan. The first of these was an Indian curry, and happily I happened to have a packet of Cholula hot sauce in my pocket.
I drifted off to sleep at some point, though it was difficult to get comfortable.
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