|
|
|
free rollerskating in Charlottesville
Sunday, February 9 2025
location: the bed in Nathan's furnished basement apartment, Little High Street, Charlottesville, VA
I didn't have the best sleep despite the amazing apartment. At some point I awoke and heard a fairly loud piano being played nearby. One of the things played was a Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata." I had no idea at the time what the time was, but it seemed like the wee hours of the morning. Later I discovered the piano had been played by Nathan and Janine's son A in the non-apartment part of the basement.
This morning I got up and took a shower, doing what I could to blow as much snot as I could out of my nostrils. Then I entered the other part of the house through an adjacent basement door and climbed up to the first floor. There I chatted with Nathan for a surprisingly long time before he realized he hadn't even offered me coffee. We talked about a lot of things, particularly his mother Mary Kay, who would be visiting this morning. When she arrived, I'd just returned from a visit to the bathroom in the furnished apartment. She parked behind my car and was immediately gushing about how delighted she was to see me after all these years. She also joked about my car having New York plates and the complex rigamarole necessary to get into the yard (there's a little treat cache on the top of the fence so one can bribe one's way past the dogs without them escaping). Looking at me, she said she could still tell it was me despite the passage of time. To me, she kind of looked the same as I'd remembered her, though of course the 85 year old version of it. She'd always struck me as a proper Southern lady (her always accent read as Deep-South to me and Nathan had lived in Atlanta before moving to the Shenandoah Valley in the 4th grade), with nice clothes and a clean house, all of which contrasted heavily with the environment I was brought up in.
She hadn't been at Nathan's long before she launched into a monologue about how her religion now is "Celtic," by which I think she meant "druid" or perhaps "pagan." When I offered "pagan" as a synonym, that seemed fine with her, though she wanted to make clear that traditionally "pagan" meant "country." This was, of course, a huge change from the proper Mrs. V I remember her being back in my childhood. Back then, Nathan had identified as Roman Catholic and when I'd visit him, we'd all hold hands to say grace before eating a meal. Tellingly, though, Nathan was one of the first kids after me excused from weekly lessons in the "bible trailer," so something non-standard had been going on with his family's faith journey. Then after that, Nathan's father Roger was found to have been breaking and entering into houses all over the area, which led to something like five years in prison. Eventually Mary Kay and Roger divorced, only to get back together shortly before he died of a massive stroke. Mary Kay claimed that her recent faith journey took a turn when she and a childhood friend (the Coiner who had married Art Fisher back when Fisher Auto Parts was called Coiner Auto Parts) took a trip to Ireland. Since then, Mary Kay says, her religion is all about nature. Then she wanted to know what religion I am. "I'm not religious at all," I said honestly. What about my wife. "She's Jewish," I said, "but a Jewish atheist." All this seemed to delight Mary Kay, who evidently wanted any answer that wasn't Christian.
Nathan had been acting like he and his sister are increasingly concerned by Mary Kay's advanced age. They're horrified that she still drives and are happy that she finally moved into a senior living community (mostly just so she doesn't have to mow the grass and that sort of thing). The implication was they think she might not be as sharp as she used to be. But from my perspective, she seemed plenty sharp. She might stumble to find the right word occasionally, but I do that too. A strong indication of how well her brain is functoning is the fact that she could pursue tangents, discuss them to completion, and then return to the earlier part of the discussion without any help, something that my friends and I occasionally struggle to do (and always have).
Mary Kay didn't stay long; she had some gas to buy at a particular gas station and some other shopping errands to run (she lives across the mountain in Waynesboro). After she was gone, I had a lot of questions for Nathan that I hadn't thought to ask before. Growing up, it had always seemed like David Fisher (one of the scions of the wealthy Coiner-Fisher auto parts empire) was friendlier with Nathan than their respective socioeconomic stati would dictate. True, there weren't many kids in our public school, and David, Nathan, and I were always in the most advanced classes of our grade. But I hadn't know that Mary Kay had been childhood friends with David Fisher's mother, and that explained a lot. (There was also a brief period in the early 80s when the Fishers seemed to be trying to cultivate a friendship between David and me. But based on a few things David's father Art said on occasion, I suspect the goal there was to expose David to my "Upper Midwestern" accent so he'd sound a little less like a hick.)
One final topic of discussion before Nathan had to do some chores was his adopted daughter J. She's the one who converted to Islam after being embraced by Charlottesville's large Afghan community. According to Nathan, things eventually became scary when it became clear that the Afghan family she was spending the most time with was trying to arrange her marriage to a relative back in Kabul. When Nathan got wind of this, he showed J the State Department webpage about travel to Afghanistan, where appartently it advises those who must travel there to please leave a DNA sample in America so they can be identified should the worst happen. No rational American would want their daughter moving to Kabul for numerous reasons. Evidetly this evidence was convincing, and once it was clear that J had no interest in marrying the man in Kabul, the family she was hanging out with became a lot less welcoming. After that, J started dating a young Bangladeshi man. He's apparently a Muslim illegal alien with perhaps not the most enlightened view of women, but he's someone who is here now and doesn't want to take J to one of the most dangerous parts of the world. She ended up dropping out of high school and moving in with the Bangladeshi somewhere in Queens, so it's all a bit of a fail for the time being. But she does have a job: as a barista at Starbucks.
I decided to drive out to the general location of Pantops Mountain, where I remember there being a supermarket, so I could buy some orange juice. But my knowledge of Charlottesville geography had grown a bit rusty, and it took a few wrong turns to find it. The grocery store at Pantops is another Food Lion, though it's a bit less trashy than the one on 5th Street. By then the day was warm enough for me to drive around with the window down. There were apparently never any laws passed about stores giving out plastic or paper bags in Virginia, so people there are still largely out of the habit of bringing their own bags to grocery stores. So when the cashier saw I had mine, she seemed impressed.
Meanwhile, Jessika had been telling me about a place she and the family goes rollerskating and I'd decided this might be fun for me, even though I'd only ever gone rollerskating once before (and had, or course, been terrible at it). So I drove over to Jessika's place at around 4:00pm and eventually she, Aaron, their daughter S and I all piled into Jessika's Nissan Cube and drove to an old school that had been turned into a community facility called the Carver Recreation Center. On the way over, Jessika and S pointed out all the strange features of the cube, which included ripples in the plastic interior surfaces in various places and an inexplicable merkin of shag carpet on the dashboard (a place where Jessika has set up a diorama featuring a praying mantis and other creepy crawlies).
Roller skating at Carter Recreation Center is entirely free. One doesn't even pay to rent the skates. You sign in and tell the guy at the entrance to the "rink" what your shoe size is, and out comes a pair of skates. The rink is just an old cafeteria or gym with wooden floors, and there are patches on those floors where the skating can be a little rough. Since skating is free, it seems to cater a diverse, largely-minority population. There were women wearing hijabs, Hispanics, East Asians, and African Americans. I could be wrong, but it seemed like we might've been the only white people there.
After putting on my skates, I gingerly rose to my feet and then started feeling out the perils. After some rocking to and fro (and lots of encouragement and advice from Jessika), I started to slowly skate around the space, keeping far to the outside so as to avoid the others, most of whom were more practiced and going much faster. I couldn't figure out how to propel myself any other way than to use the rubber toe stop on the toe of my left foot to kick against the ground. Then once I got rolling that way, I managed to continue for awhile by alternately squeezing my skates towards each other and then pressing them outward, an action that called upon muscles I barely use under normal circumstances. I kept with it despite the soreness I knew I'd be suffering from. We were there for something like an hour, and I fell down twice (first backwards, then forwards). But my skating was improving. If I lived in Charlottesville and went there regularly, I'd be competent at it in a few weeks.
Aside the free skates to borrow and the place to skate, the only other amenity was music played from a sound system. There were no refreshments of any sort. Towards the end of our time there, the crowd got smaller and smaller until it was only us. And then the guy serving as DJ and skate matchmaker said skating time was over. As we left the venue, he gave me a fist bump, because damn it, I'd tried. Despite my awkwardness on skates, the whole experience had been an uplifting one for me. There's something about a diverse group of people coming together in public to do something fun that resonates with me on a deep level. [Later when talking about it with Gretchen, I would compare it to how I'd felt giving out candy on Maryann's Mulberry Street stoop in Rochester, New York back on Halloween.]
Back at Jessika & Aaron's house, Jessika was working on another soup, and which she was finishing that up, I drank tea and sat in the living room with Aaron and S. Tonight was Superbowl Sunday, and Aaron had the game up on his laptop, though he had the sound off and didn't seem to be paying much attention. S had borrowed a copy of a recent issue of Ranger Rick Jr. from the library and was reading off mutiple choice questions from a section called something like "Stump Your Parents" about US Presidents. The questions were pretty easy, though, and neither Aaron nor I were getting many of them wrong.
When the soup was ready, it was sort of vegan mushroom chowder, with a creamy consistency resulting from almond milk and processed cashews. I remembered to get a brand new bottle of calypso sauce I'd brought with me, which was good for zinging things up to the level of spiciness my condition called for (although I got the feeling Jessika was a little offended that I didn't just eat it the way she'd made it).
Meanwhile Nathan's wife Janine had made food over there and I didn't want to stand them up like I'd stood up Nathan last night. So I wished everyone in Jessika's household a good evening and drove back to Little High Street.
After attending to some things in the furnished apartment, I entered the other half of the basement and found Nathan and Janine hanging out in the basement teevee room watching the Superbowl on the massive OLED display there. Nathan said that the game was actually being received as an over-the-air digital broadcasts, and that he can get a fair number of stations that way using a small antenna at basement level there at the bottom of a hill. I told Nathan about my attempts to get over-the-air broadcasts using a large antenna mounted high above my roof at my hilltop Hurley home, and that I'd only been about to get a handful of stations, none of which carried programming I was interested in. Janine had made a bunch of mostly-vegan Mexican sides that one could assemble into various nacho plate configurations, so that was what I had as a second dinner. Nathan was drinking one of the boozy Dragon's Milk stouts I'd brought, so I decided to have one as well.
As for the game, at the time the Philadelphia Eagles were leading the Kansas City Chiefs thirty some points to zero, so the game had little entertainment value. The ads, of course, were a cultural phenomenon. But we're all so used to what artificial intelligence can do that they'd lost their ability to wow. One ad that featured different groups of people with different hats built into their heads as fleshy extensions reflecting their innate subcultural nature (fantasy dork, country music enthusiast, etc.) had an off-putting body horror quality to it had us shaking our heads. And then there was the half-time show where Kendrick Lamar orchestrated a quasi-fascist hip-hop dance routine in service (one imagines) to his obession with Drake's supposed interest in sex with children.
Later, an older couple Nathan is friends with joined our little Superbowl party, and, because the game itself was pretty dull, I found myself chatting with the male half of the couple about electric cars and charging mine at an off-grid cabin. It came up that I was in the area because my mother had died on Wednesday. But then it turned out that the male half of the couple had known my father back when he was alive via the local environmentalist social network.
At some point Nathan wanted to show me a project his son A has been working on, so Nathan and I went with A to his room, and he showed us a model of a one-degree-of-freedom force-feedback stick control he's been working on. Most of his contribution was to the physical gearing of the stick, which was something he'd 3D printed. But he'd also written some controller code, which was running on an ESP8266 (my favorite microcontroller!). I asked if A had Github site, and it turned out he did. So I said we should exchange information about that.
After that extremely social day, I retreated into the furnished apartment, made myself a boozy orange juice drink to help fall asleep, and climbed into bed.
Aaron and his daughter skating. Click to enlarge.
A blurry Jessika skates past. Click to enlarge.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?250209 feedback
previous | next |
