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Aumaury in the basement, Leah in Woodstock
Wednesday, July 26 2023
My friend Leah from Charlottesville had, along with the rest of her family, been in various places in New York State for some days (starting, I believe, in Ithaca). Originally she'd had plans to come visit the cabin (at around the same time Jessika and family would be visiting, completely coincidentally), but it was a lot of driving and Leah decided to just visit me in Hurley (and Jessika gave up on visiting me at all). Her plan for today was to drive down early from a "flophouse" in Albany so her husband Aumaury could work remotely from our house for the day, starting bright & early at 8:00am. (He has a tech job involving using machine learning to find flaws in railroad tracks.) So I got up earlier than I've been getting up since my lay-off (as I told Leah, I've been "sleeping late like a teenager") so I'd be around to calm the dogs and show Aumaury where to work.
Not surprisingly, Leah and family arrived considerably later than planned. Leah did what I was told her to do, to act like she already knew and loved the dogs. She even had vegan milk bones to give them. But their achey joints were slow in delivering them to the driveway. Meanwhile, Leah & Aumaury's seven year old kid Aubert was looking very sleepy in the back of their Prius. I whisked Aumaury down to the basement and told him what the hot spots were. Naturally, of course, his stupid work-issued Windows 10 laptop couldn't get to the internet from any of the hotspots when he tried from the master guestroom. But, surprisingly, from the Gunther guestroom (the one Powerful had stayed in), he had no trouble. So I he set himself up in there, just in time for a boring meeting on the subject (presumably) of identifying flaws in railroad tracks. Meanwhile Gretchen was making smoothies, one of which I took down to Aumaury. Later I made a french press of coffee and took a cup of that downstairs to him as well.
Leah kept saying she and Aubert could go do something else and give me peace and quiet for the morning. But unlike most people, I enjoy hanging out with her, so we ended up sitting out on the east deck, where the sun and wind kept the mosquitoes away. Gretchen had thawed out some muffins that weren't so great, so we were mostly eating slices of cucumber from an enormous plant Gretchen had planted in our garden (she hates cucumbers but had planted it for my benefit). Meanwhile Aubert was seriously loving on the dogs, and there seemed to be no limit how much love they could absorb. It being a workday for Gretchen, she'd left for the bookstore by 11:00am. Eventually Aumaury surfaced from the basement for a lunch of leftover pizza. I forget all the things we talked about, but one of those was the fact that Gretchen's parents now live in John Mitchell's old apartment in the Watergate. Leah & Aumaury had lived together for ten years in Wsahington, DC and were familiar with the Watergate. When I said that we were initially puzzled by the in-laws' move to the Watergate but that it's a great location and now we love it, Aumaury agreed vehemently, saying it was a particularly good place for the elderly. "Yeah," I said, "my mother-in-law has had all her joints replaced and even she's able to walk to everything."
Later in the afternoon, Aubert got sleepy and went off to take a nap. After much consideration, Leah and I decided not to take a small boat tour from the Rondout to the lighthouse but to instead go together to Woodstock to visit Gretchen at the bookstore and see what the fuss is all about (regarding the village itself, which Leah had never visited). So I drove us there in the Forester, passing the ever-gorgeous Ashokan Reservoir on the way (though today it was somewhat shrouded in haze, perhaps from Canadian wildfires). I parked in the back and we went directly to the Golden Notebook, where Gretchen was working. Actually, a lot of people were working, because Neil Gaiman had just been there to do one of his marathon book-signings (which he does to support the bookstore and for the benefit of the many fans the store ships them to). After introductions to the many staff members, Leah went upstairs to the kids' section to try to find another book in the Wings of Fire series (a series of kid-targeted illustrated novels about the dragons of an island world; the illustrations aren't amazing, but Aubert likes them). Leah didn't find any that she didn't already have, so instead she eavesdropped on a woman who was trying to face-time her kid as he or she was playing a violin. Meanwhile, I was thumbing through a fairly entertaining illustrated guide to gender issues.
Later Leah and I strolled around to check out the various shops in Woodstock. This kind of thing drives me nuts when Gretchen and her parents want to do it, but since it was all new to Leah, I was happy to indulge her. We went into an icecream place that had vegan options and the apothecary where I received a large fraction of my covid vaccines before spending most of our time in Houst, the biggest hardware store right in the middle of town (which I'd visited only the day before). It turned out they had a surprisingly big toy section I'd never noticed, and this included the stuffed birds that electronically sing their characteristic songs when squeezed (we have a bunch of them, though nearly all of their batteries are long-dead). Leah decided to get three of those: the goldfinch (one of which we'd seen earlier on a tour I failed to mention of the laboratory and solar deck), a red-winged blackbird, and a loon. Houst is full of fun toys, including a multi-function knife that includes the tiniest, least useful hammer ever. Leah said that this would be where she would do all her Christmas shopping if she lived in the area. When the cashier rang us up (he was the same guy who rang me up yesterday) he said that the stuffed birds with electronic songs were a top-seller at the Houst. Leah wondered, though, if the constant mournful calls of loons was going to drive him insane. "It's great they're keeping the store afloat," she added.
Our final stop in Woodstock was in Sunflower, where Leah wanted to get some provisions for tonight's dinner as well as things like refried beans in case her kid didn't like what Gretchen would be serving (kids are usually much more particular about food than adults are). While we were in there, I happened to notice a small freezer full of boutique meats such as yak, wild board, elk, and very expensive lobster tail, much of it going for about $15/pound. When I told Leah about it, she had to see. She's a vegetarian, though the rest of her family love to eat the meats.
Back in Hurley, Aumaury said the house had been in a power outage since 4:00pm, cutting him off from his remote workplace. With his working no longer a possibility, we all started drinking the Hazy Little Thing beers I'd had enough foresight to put in the refrigerator.
Soon after Gretchen returned home, the power came back on. But it was too late for Aumaury to resume his workday. Gretchen ran around preparing vegan cheese and crackers while Leah and Aumaury busted into some wine they'd brought. (They'd brought other gifts too, though I don't know about associating their names with them in a Google search.)
We tried sitting out on the east deck using a machine that vaporizes a mosquito repellant, but either it didn't work or we didn't switch it on correctly, and we soon had to retreat back indoors to the dining room, where Gretchen was serving a meal based on baked manicotti stuffed with vegan cheese and other wonders. Over dinner, we had a long conversation about Aumaury's family back in Belgium. Evidently they were closely-tied (or even part of) the Beligian royal family, which squandered its wealth, leaving them all to fend for themselves. Members of Aumaury's family had also participated in the brutal colonial rule of the Belgian Congo, creating a legacy of casual racism and unnecessarily histrionic protocol enforcement (particularly with regard to brie, that is, the cheese), all of which embarrasses and amuses Aumaury to this day.
Later the conversation shifted to the free-range goat farm run by Leah's friend in Ithaca that they had all just visited. The goats are bred to produce both milk and offspring in the same way that my parents did. They eat some of the castrated males, though usually they find homes for them by people who want goats. Leah tried to defend it as an okay form of farming, but Gretchen wasn't having it, comparing it to the plantations where the masters treated the slaves well back before the Civil War. It's hard to defend against that kind of argument, but lord knows Leah tried. As for me, I kept out of it for fear of either pissing off Gretchen or alienating Leah. I don't take a hardline on the vegan worldview and could agree with some of what Leah was saying, though of course Gretchen's moral stance was completely sound. Happily, the conversation changed to something else eventually without leaving anyone too injured by things said in that argument.
Aubert is an amazingly good kid in such situations, not interrupting or interfering with adult conversation or otherwise demanding that attention turn to him. This was particularly apparent given that there were no kids his age to play with. To burn off energy, sometimes he flailed about the entry way unapologetically muttering things to himself, since he had his own kid-fantasy life to fall back on (I remember how that was). Other times he returned to deep-snuggling with the dogs, who, he was saying, were the best in the world. That's something I say all the time without really believing it, and at some point Aubert realized he was short-changing Jessika's dog Myrtle, the main dog in his life. So he would include her as a footnote or afterthought at the end of such statements. But kids live in the here and now, and Myrtle wasn't part of that.
Later Aubert wanted us to play a card game called Sleeping Queens, which is hard to explain (and kind of blew my mind when Aubert tried to). But I'm a practical guy, so a little example play was all that I (and Gretchen) needed to get up to speed. Basically, there are numbers (which are basically useless) and non-numbers (which have their own rules), and the idea is to get rid of number cards so as to get the more useful cards. To do this, one gets rid of any group of cards that form both sides of a mathematical equation. So if you have 2, 4, and 6, you can get rid of all three because 2+4=6. But in one play, Aumaury ventured into math beyond Aubert's understanding with the cards 9, 1, 3, and 3. 9 to the first power is the same as 3*3, you see. (One of the goals of the game is to teach basic math.) Ultimately it was Aubert who won, though the rest of us were all playing to win and came close a few times.
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