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two Midwestern goodbyes
Friday, August 30 2024
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, NY
At 1:00pm, we drove a little ways north up Dug Hill Road to the residence of our new friends Ken & Laura, who were having us over for lunch. And no, not because they are cannibals. They're actually vegetarians, but had seemed puzzled by how to prepare vegan food. So Gretchen had given them an Isa Chandra Moskowitz book from 2019 entitled I Can Cook Vegan. I don't know if the two dishes Ken prepared were actually from that book, but, he was just finishing them up when we arrived. They offered us water, tea, or, if we wanted to do some day drinking, beer or wine. I opted for the day drinking option and was given a very good sixteen ounce hazy IPA whose citrus notes were mostly those of oranges. Once I'd said I wanted to day drink, everyone else (including Gretchen) opted to drink wine. Meanwhile, our dogs were slowly reaching a state of detente with Ken & Laura's dog Rosie. They'd occasionally snarl at each other, but before long all the animosity dwindled away completely (though it wasn't as if Rosie then became friendly).
Laura, who is a writer for television shows, was excited because she'd finally landed a job, which is apparently as hard to do for television writers as it is for software developers in this high-interest-rate economy. Laura specializes in writing for horror, and the new show is a nostalgic reboot of a familiar horror franchise from the 1980s. When I mentioned that I've been out of a job for over a year, she talked about how important it was to engage her social network to find her job. I replied that most of us software developers are "on the spectrum" and don't have social networks. But in my case I at least have Gretchen, who has a vast social network. Gretchen then tried to claim that it hadn't been effective at finding me a job, but then I pointed out that she had found me "all my jobs," which is more or less true, at least since we got together 23 years ago.
Next we moved to the dining room for the meal, which started out with a nice rich lentil stew that (unfortunately for me) also contained olives. But overall it was pretty good. What was strange was that stew had an ideal amount of salt in it, whereas the aloo gobi that followed had apparently been made completely without salt, something it desperately needed (and our friendship was still too new for us to ask for salt). Usually when people fail to put salt in food, it's because they don't know to use it or they have a palatte that doesn't require it. I think in this case, though, he'd followed the recipe exactly for one dish and perhaps accidentally forgotten to add salt for the other. Still, though, most people with any experience cooking (and Ken is 65 years old) know immediately when something needs salt.
Over lunch, Ken talked a little about his employment, such as it is these days. He's an actor presently involved in an off-Broadway show, but he says that what really gets him excited these days is the patio project he is working on just outside the front door, which he is slowly paving with various pieces of bluestone.
Other topics discussed was our recent visit with Gretchen's parents in Washington, DC, how things are going with Gretchen's brother's family, how things are going with my family, and what has been going on with Laura's brother. That was an interesting story, since Laura's brother is a gay alcoholic with a strong affinity for dusty downtrodden regions such as Kurdistan and formerly-Soviet republics in Central Asia. Gretchen was perplexed by how a gay man could ever be comfortable in places without a reputation for enlightenment regarding unusual sexual preferences, but then I pointed out that anti-gay repression is perhaps different than she thought in such places. Iran, for example, is known as being a terrible place to be gay. But Ayatollah Khomeini is famously quoted in Sayings of the Ayatollah Khomeini as permitting all sorts of decidedly gay activity so long as, say, the penis does not penetrate the anus any further than the circumcision ring. Since Kurdistan has a Shia Muslim population that is decidedly more western-oriented than the one in Iran, one could easily imagine it being quite tolerant of men practicing a gay lifestyle, especially on the downlow. (Laura says her brother has never hailed a cab in the Middle East without being propositioned, which sounds like a bit of an exaggeration.)
After the main course, out came the vegan ice cream that Gretchen had brought and some gluten-free vegan berry-cheese danishes that Laura had bought in Brooklyn. (I think she still hasn't fully realized that vegan and gluten-free are different things and that there are plenty of delicious vegan foods that are full of gluten and that people like us will happily eat them.)
There was a bit of Midwestern goodbye as we were leaving, as indicated by Gretchen bringing up an entirely new topic as we were standing by the door about to leave, a topic that then had to be thoroughly discussed. But then we were out of there, on to the second and only remaining social activity planned today before heading to the cabin: visiting our next-door neighbor A to meet her kid's two newly-adopted rats, Brie and Feta.
This was the first time I'd been very far into A's house. It's a bit chaotic in there in the way that many houses containing a seven year old are. This chaos overlays an interior that hasn't been updated since the 1970s. Gretchen thinks it desperately needs a renovation, though to my eye it looks like A should just wait four or five years for that look to come back into fashion. I'm exaggerating, of course, because there are also issues with stylistic mismatches and walls being in places where they serve no purpose (except perhaps to hold up whatever is overhead).
A's house seems to have a core that was always a house surrounded by a series of porches that have, over the years, been converted into various stages of interior spaces. We spent most of our time on the "back porch" at the south of the house, which appeared to only be a three-season space. There, someone had used the cardboard box that the fancy rat cage had come in to build a secondary rat space for A's daughter to hang out in with the rats and provide some protection against Henry the Dog, whose main thoughts about the rats is what they might taste like. While Gretchen and the kid were playing with the rats in or near the cardboard box, I hovered just outside not really knowing what to do with myself and feeling fairly useless. Meanwhile A was outside trying to make the dogs happy, since they were upset about being excluded from us and the rats. When A returned, there was some conversation about where the rats had come from. They had been rescued, but not from biological experiments. A's daughter wanted to know what sorts of experiments rats were subjected to, and A told her about the monkey experiments where baby monkeys were made to bond with mothers made of wire mesh, which reminded me of photos I'd seen in a book called The Primates (I think that was the one) in the Time Life Nature Library series back when I was a kid.
Eventually we moved out in front, where I was increasingly distracted by the distress in my rapidly-filling bladder. It seemed for a moment we were about to leave, but then it turned into a Midwestern goodbye again when Gretchen brought up a topic that then needed to be thoroughly discussed. I couldn't take it any more and walked around back, mouthing to Gretchen that I had to pee. She thought I was walking home. (The landscaping behind (south of) A's house is surprisingly beautiful, with little gardens and big roughly-built bluestone walls.) When I came around the other side of the house after pissing, Gretchen was a little surprised that I was still there, and mercifully the goodbye was finally over. By then it was something like 4:45pm.
Back at the house, we rapidly packed the Chevy Bolt and then drove up to the cabin via the Middleburgh route. Gretchen said the Bolt's FM reception has been terrible since the rear window was installed, so we listened instead to music from her Spotify playlist, at least in places where we had a cell signal.
Normally this route is uneventful, but unfortunately this weekend was the annual Fonda Fair, and it ground traffic to a crawl both north and southbound into Fonda. We joined the end of the line of slow-moving vehicles on the south village limits of Fultonville (just across the Mohawk from Fonda) and we couldn't drive normally again until we passed the pedestrians crossing Bridge Stret to get to the fair grounds. (Though Google did send us on a small detour of part of Fultonville that saved us a couple minutes.)
Up at the cabin, light was fading, and I was soon drinking a boozy drink. But then I started researching what might be wrong with the FM antenna on the Chevy Bolt. I had trouble tracking down where exactly the antenna might be using Google, though ChatGPT (which, as we know, can be unreliable even when its answers are emphatic) was pretty sure the antenna was integrated into the rear window, something it came up with without me having explained how the FM reception went from good to bad. So I went out in the dark and pried off the plastic inner surface from the hatch to reveal the underlying wires and such. (As always, that shroud came off semi-destructively, launching tiny plastic tabs and such as it suddenly came loose.) I then used a piece of 40 inch long copper wire (which I know from experience works as a simple FM antenna) to see if I could improve radio reception by touch various things. I also tried disconnecting reconnecting the two visible wires attached to the metal traces embedded in the back window. I'd thought they were there to provide the defrost function, but ChatGPT had me thinking they might also somehow be the antenna. But nothing I did made the FM reception improve at all. There was a little black box about the size of a Bic lighter that eBay searches suggested was an "antenna amplifier," though I couldn't see that it was attached to anything. And then it started raining before I could investigate further.
About the only thing I had for dinner was Costco grape leaves, Hannaford mildy-salted peanuts, and Cracker Master crackers (also from Costco).
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