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virtual antitheft-button
Friday, July 30 2021
location: near the east end of Little High Street, Charlottesville, Virginia
I saw Nathan briefly this morning before he had to go upstairs to do a videoconference. Amusingly, his workplace is only a quarter mile away, and yet he's still working from home. I got a cup of coffee and went out on the font stoop with Brian the Dog to greet the morning before the sun got too high and enveloped Charlottesville in the dog-breath of a typical late July. With a nice dog, a cup of coffee, and a laptop connected to gigabit fiber-optic internet, what else did I need. I felt better than I had any reason to, which was probably because this was the best coffee I'd drunk on the entire trip.
As Nathan was showing me to the fancy shower in the attic expanson, he jokingly pointed out how Janine is more of a disordered slop than he is, casually throwing her dirty clothes on the bannisters (just like I do!). But, as I pointed out, Nathan has his own issues. He's had the same pile of uninstalled baseboard in his attic for more than 20 years.
Now it was time to begin the Jessika phase of my Charlottesville trip. Initially the plan was to meet here some sort of burrito or taco place. But then we decided to just make burritos at her house. I drove out to the Food Lion on 5th Street southwest to get various things: radishes, limes, avocados, a single roma tomato, two jalapeños, and a package of Mexican-style Chao vegan shredded cheese. I also got a 12 pack of Modelo, though I would've preferred a sixer. The one thing I forgot to get was tortillas, but that was okay because Jessika had beans and blue corn chips, so we could eat burrito bowls out on the back deck.
An obvious topic of conversation was my mother, particularly how it was she came to give all of her discretionary money to Sara L. Kesterson between the years 2010 and 2017. In Jessika's life, she's finally selling that first house she bought, the one out on Hogwaller that she lived in during the early 2000s and has rented out since. She's hoping to have a bidding war on it and sell it for north of $200,000, which would represent a tidy profit from the $60,000 it had originally cost her.
Meanwhile Sylvie, Jessika's 5 year old daughter, had been off with her grandfather, Aaron's father, referred to by Sylvie as "Grumps." They arrived while we were sitting in the front yard and it turned out Grumps knew me from back in the days when I was part of Bozart (1995-1996). He even remembered by Punch Buggy Green, my old art car covered with broken mirrors, pennies, and the neologism "NAMBLALANCE" written backwards above the windshield.
Once Sylvie arrived, she became the center of attention, which is how it always is with young children. We played some sort of game involving tiles viewed through a moir´ grating, which allowed for simple animations. And then Sylvie wanted to play store, with Jessika and me "buying" things from around the house and Sylvie ringing us up from a plastic cash register as we left. (Among my purchases were several convincing-looking miniature leafy vegetables and a statue of "the World's Youngest Dirty Old Man." I asked Sylvie what she'd do if we tried to leave without paying, and she decided there was an anti-theft button in a doorway for her to push, though there was also a cancel button when I decided I wanted to pay after all.
Later Sylvie showed us how she could climb up the side the house to the deck in a way that most contemporary parents would forbid as being too unsafe. But Jessika and I remember being five years old and how we loved to climb. We also remember that we were sensible enough at that age not to fall. (It's amazing what millions of years of natural selection can do.)
As the sun began to get low in the sky, we tried to make fire with a pair of magnifying glasses, but their focal lengths were different enough to make this difficult. But this meant they'd make for a more powerful makeshift telescope. Unfortunately, making a telescope out of two lenses highlights any tiny flaws they happen to have.
Jessika told me that our old friend Deya (whom I hadn't seen since Shonin's wedding back in 2009) had moved from New York City back to Charlottesville and that she (Jessika) was trying to get her to come over tonight. Initially Deya resisted, but in the end she came over, having left her little son and husband back at her place. By then Jessika's husband had gotten home from work and it was time to do something about dinner. We ended up ordering from a Thai place, which is how I came to be eating mediocre pad thai. I added lots of jalapeño slices (from the peppers I'd bought earlier) but that could only help so much.
By then I was drinking red wine and feeling pretty good. Then I started smoking some pot, which made me feel even better (something it doesn't always do). Deya is shy and doesn't talk much, so I kept asking her questions, such as what was becoming of her childhood home now that her father has died and her mother is in assisted living. I also asked about what she does now for a living. (In NYC she'd worked as a arborist for the city, mostly dealing with complaints about individual trees on private property. Now she works more as a naturalist, which is a big improvement.) As for things I had to say about my life, they mostly concerned the sorry state into which my mother had allowed herself to fall.
Other topics of discussion included Jessika's ongoing effort to sell her house in Hogwaller. After I was drunk and stoned, I started to mansplain the various tax implications and how best to deal with the inevitable capital gains. I made sure to remind Jessika that such capital gains are taxed at a significantly lower rate than normal income. This is, I explained, because "rich people" stuff is always treated better by our system than "poor people" stuff.
After everyone else left or went to bed, Jessika and I stayed up for another half hour or more talking about things that the wine had made impossible to commit to memory.
Look how cute we all still are in midlife! From left: Deya, me, and Jessika. Photo by Aaron.
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