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Nathan's amazing furnished apartment
Saturday, February 8 2025
location: the couch in the Shaque, Stingy Hollow Road, rural Augusta County, VA
I woke up this morning feeling better, with just a ghost of a sore throat and not much of the fever-related weakness I'd felt yesterday. My childhood friend Nathan in Charlottesville had been telling me I should come stay in the furnished basement in his house instead of, well, the primitive conditions in the Shaque. And now I felt capable of driving over there to take him up on his offer. First, though, I had to go poop (this time I did it in the goat pasture, using a mix of wet grass, leaves, and a quarter-inch-layer of freshly-fallen sleet as toilet paper. Then I decided to explore the barn my mother had built at some point in the early 2000s (meaning that it has no nostalgic value for me). It's a modern structure made with roof trusses, meaning it has an unusable attic. In one of the horse stalls, I found numerous datura pods and fresh green catnip. I then looked up overhead and noticed a fair number of nails driven through the roofing metal had failed to find battens, suggesting the quality of the workmanship on the barn was sub-par, something my mother had been too ignorant to detect. Some of those nails weren't there, and I could see daylight through the holes. And most of the batten were mottled with different colors that suggested water damage. I went inside the two non-open stalls and found these were hoarded full of various things like all the other interior spaces, though most of those things were at least related to horses. There were bridles, horse feed, straw, and such but almost nothing I would find useful except for a couple screw eyes.
After taking 150 mg of pseudoephedrine to moderate my cold/flu symptoms, I went over to Creekside to tell my brother Don that I'd be gone for a few days but would be coming back on Monday to meet our mother's lawyer to get some clarity on things that Joy Tarder had been vague about. And then I drove to Charlottesville. Conditions were extremely foggy as I crossed Afton Mountain (the top of the Blue Ridge), but otherwise the drive was uneventful.
Since I'd be visiting two different sets of people today, I stopped at the Food Lion on 5th Street. That's always been one of the more ghetto of Charlottesville's supermarkets, and the two things I noted today was that a lot of people were wearing face masks and that it wasn't just the majority of customers wearing either sweat pants of pajama bottoms, some of the cashiers were as well. I bought a four pack of boozy Dragon's Milk stout for Nathan, some kombucha and orange juice for Jessika, and a pack of grapes for each. Then I drove to Nathan's house near the bottom of Little High Street. I was greeted by the fluffier of his two enormous great-pyrenees-adjacent dogs, I forget her name. The other's name is Brian, a name I remembered. Initially I was wearing a mask, but Nathan told me to take it off because Brian might not take it well. And with that, I stopped worrying about wearing a mask. I immediately joined Nathan and his wife Janine in the kitchen, chatting about all manner of the things in the easy way we have. Interestingly, though, we didn't discuss my mother or her estate at all. I don't think we even talked about my brother Don. I mentioned recent work in Rochester and the recent asbestos headaches at Brewster Street. There was also talk about how easy electrical work is, despite that fact that many tradesmen are terrified of it. This, Nathan said, puts electricians at the top of the hierarchy when it comes to the Trump-loving building trades.
Another topic of discussion was the next door neighbor (an electrician, actually) who had responded to one of those flyers one sees stapled to telephone poles saying that an entity will buy a house for cash. Since houses are worth a lot, the fact that they can be sold "for cash" never exactly blows my mind. But this guy actually called the number and ended up selling his house for only $200,000. The person who bought it managed to make $150,000 on a flip, and then couple after that sold it for $600,000. Janine said she was so mad about this; she and Janine had told the guy that if he ever wanted to sell they'd be interested in buying. And then, on an impulse, he threw away all that money. The lesson here is that if an offer is on a telephone pole, there is a much better deal available.
At some point during all this, Nathan and Janine's son A came out from wherever he'd been. He's 18, applying for colleges and is a handsome blond a little taller than his parents.
Janine was making chickpea salad sandwiches, one of which I ate even though I wasn't particularly hungry. I was a little concerned that if I socialized too hard I might interfere with my recovery from whatever illness I had.
Nathan had repeatedly offered me a furnished apartment to stay in (as opposed to the rustic clutter of the Shaque), so he eventually took me down to the basement to show me what he was talking about. It was absolutely stunning, complete with a kitchen having a subway tile backsplash. There was also a living room, bedroom, bathroom, and laundry room. There was a bed, a nice comfy couch, and several chairs. It was so well-staged that I half expected its refrigerator to be fully-stocked with expensive mini-bar items. I gushed about how amazing it was, delighted to have such a place to recover in. The plan, Nathan said, was to rent it out as a short-term apartment for visiting nurses hired for a several-month contract at UVA. That way he could charge a premium but not have to deal with all the work of an AirBnB.
Nathan had actually shown me this space before, back when there were problems he hadn't figured out how to solve. One of those was probably the bathroom, which forces the entire apartment into a decided L-shape. Nathan also mentioned that painting the space had taken forever, mostly because of how many coats of paint the exposed pipes required. Nathan than took me for a tour of the rest of the basement, most of which is finished but some of which is not. The boiler room, for example, is not finished, and Nathan has a little desk setup there where he can tinker with knives, an obsession I hadn't really known about. (Ray is also very into knives.) Nathan also showed me an aborted attempt he made at building a metering system to determine how to charge the residents of the furnished apartment for their heating needs, something that is no longer necessary now that the apartment is heated with a minisplit. He then explained the long term plan to eventually open a door between the furnished apartment and the other liveable parts of the basement to make a place large enough for him and Janine to live while renting out the entire upstairs to a wealthy tenant, a plan that might be necessary given the coming college education expenses they expect to be racked up by their son.
I retreated for awhile by myself into the hotel-like serenity of the furnished apartment, taking a nice non-field shit and then a hot shower with both shampoo and conditioner. I also brushed my teeth with real toothpaste.
Later I contacted Jessika, who had been making a soup she thought might be good for my illness. Eventually I drove over there and soon had met her new dog Blaudy, a gold & black shepherd mix whose barking Myrtle (the little three-legged Boston Terrier) tried her best to silence. Soon Blaudy had decided I was okay and he stuck close to me so I could keep stroking his long narrow head and velvety ears. The soup was a "lemon-forward" lentil concoction with onions and mushrooms which seemed soothing for the things still raw in my throat and light enough that it could fit in easily over the thick substrate of chickpea salad sandwich. Soon Jessika's husband Aaron and the daughter S returned from a Chinese New Year celebration. S is very much into Kung Fu these days and recently received her first sash. She proceeded to show us most of four "forms" (I think that is the term). She also told us about the various kinds of forms. I don't really understand what it all means and what pratical use the forms have (except, perhaps, to be intimidating). But clearly S was very into them. For most of this time, she was effortlessly swinging back and forth on a large fabric loop hanging from a hook driven into a header overhead (in a wall opening connecting the living room to a side room). She was so practiced at this that sometimes she'd fling herself to some random furniture and end up perched on it in a move that was both effortlessly graceful and completely silent.
Somewhere in all of this Jessika and S discussed an awkward incident where one of S's classmates asked her if she would be her friend. How does one handle this? S's response was something like, "Sure?" "That's not a question any adult would ever ask another adult," I declared.
I thought it best to leave before dinnertime. I thought it would be great to do some alcohol-facilitated relaxing in the furnished apartment. But I would need more alcohol. In Virginia, real booze is only sold at state-owned Alcohol Beverage Control (ABC) locations, and I remember one such place being on Main Street between the Downtown Mall and The Corner. But as I drove on Main Street westward towards the corner, I was disoriented by a large number of tall buildings that had been erected since I'd last lived in Charlottesville. I wondered if the old ABC store had been relocated, but no, it was exactly where it had always been. But now its low-rise brick structure was almost completely surrounded by taller buildings. I went in there and bought a half gallon of Popov vodka, because I couldn't find the gin section. The Africa-American cashier wished me a "blessed" evening.
When I got back to Nathan's furnished apartment, I didn't have the energy to do much else. So I told Nathan to cancel the plans of going out to Charlottesville's one vegan restaurant. Nathan later messaged me to say he'd gotten some pizza and that I could have a slice, that it was waiting for me in the other half of the basement. I found him there watching teevee on the massive screen he has there. The pizza was from Christian's and had no cheese on it, but it was covered in huge vegetables and was excellent just the way it was.
Blaudy (left) and Myrtle (right) at Jessika's house. Click to enlarge.
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