"You've got to find what you love and let it kill you."
-Kinky Friedman
An incredibly busy, not so productive weekend.
Friday morning, not long after P left for work, I drove up the hill to the Cliff to pick up the Ram and drag the Chris Craft over to Cayuga Wooden Boat Works for some help with the engine. With mist hanging along the ridgelines and cobalt blue skies, it was one of the loveliest drives of my life, tempered by listening to NPR unpack the debate disaster.
The voice on the radio didn't report the other bad news of last Thursday, the death of Kinky Friedman at 79. Friedman was sort of a not-always-nice John Prine, with songs like "Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns into Bed" and "They Ain't Makin' Jews Like Jesus Anymore". He ran for governor, wrote books and a regular piece for Texas Monthly, and was just an interesting part of a Texas that is passing away with him. The world just got a little grayer.
Phil and Ken over at CWBW cheerfully spent two hours with me. Ken, the motor guy, explained that it's all about building relationships with the wooden boat owners up here on the lakes, and the two of them walked me through how to take care of the mahogany and the trim, details that were wrong in the restoration that I would've never caught, and how to maneuver the single-screw boat in tight spaces. But they couldn't fix the engine issue, which leaves me at barely above idle, so she's still there in their boat barn, parked right next to a 21 footer once owned by Telly Savalas.
We may have her back by the 4th, although Peg has vetoed the notion of us trying to launch on that busy, busy day on the lake.
Having dropped off the boat, it was back to the Cliff to switch cars, then down the hill so I could pick up Peg, who'd just gotten off work, and drive right back up the hill for supper at the CYC and an evening out on the lavishly decorated veranda for a postprandial as the weather rolled in around us.
We awoke Saturday to rain, which made crawling out of bed and going to the gym that much more difficult. Peg had discovered that her favorite exercise program, Body Pump, was offered at the Canandaigua YMCA, so we pulled ourselves together and arrived there just before the class started. Afterward we drove in the rain up to Rochester, calling my sister along the way to talk about Dad's latest fall. This time Johnnie got hurt as well, and once again the paramedics came through the front door of Eldorado Drive to pull him up off the floor. It's all pretty horrible. I called him yesterday, and he assured it won't be much longer. I feel he's probably right.
Rochester is a surprisingly hip and architecturally interesting town, with blocks of old mansions from the boomtown days of Kodak, Xerox, and Bausch & Lomb. We rewarded ourselves for our exercise discipline with a lunch of pizza and fried eggplant washed down with a glass of fine cab. From there we made our way to the Rochester City Market, a teeming series of stalls featuring all manner of vegetables, meat, fish, and bangles of various sorts.
Peg bought an enormous garland of garlic we'll be eating from over the next several months.
She also purchased a big grocery bag filled with all sorts of edible fungus, from a cheerful hippie type already preparing to convert his 2400 square feet of mushroom compost into psylocibin as soon as the legislature legalizes it.
On the way back to the car we stopped into a smithery to admire iron sculptures, and a boutique where Peg struck up a conversation with the owner about everything from art to a common connection to East Tennessee, waiting for a torrential downpour to abate.
Like I said, Rochester is a far cooler town than we expected.
Capping the afternoon, we drove over to the Genesee Beer brewery, which boasts a rooftop bar where you can sip a beer and view the High Falls that run through the middle of downtown. The rooftop was closed due to the rain, but we still found a spot for a drink and a chance to admire the falls.
We swung through Lowes and the always frantic Canandaigua Wegman's, the former for a drill and some hardware to hang curtains, the latter for guacamole fixings, then back to the Cliff for a couple more hours on the porch before falling dead asleep in the cave-like master bedroom.
Sunday morning the weather started to clear, and we enjoyed our coffee a little too long, arriving at church ten minutes late. No worry: they ran ten minutes long, with the priest in his last two weeks of service to that parish waxing long and elegaic about his fourteen years there, so we got our full hour's worth of Rite 2. On our drive we noticed downed trees and branches in Cheshire and all along West Lake Road--apparently a tornado had swept down through Cheshire and across the lake. They never see tornadoes here, we've been told. But climate change is a hoax.
We spent the next few hours reading and listening to the Braves lose while hanging drapes outside; Peg's solution to walls covered in ugly, brown hard coat stucco. The lake was busy with boaters and skiiers, which made us miss our vessel and contemplate whether we should give up and just get a pontoon boat like everyone else up here.
Mid-afternoon we drove up the mountain to the Majestic Hills Golf Course, a family-run nine hole operation busy with proletarian golfers in tank tops and jorts. The view was nothing short of spectacular, looking down over rows of ridgelines to the west. Peg needed a pullover because it was so cold and windy, a great blessing on the last day of June.
The day ended in front of the boob tube with a plate of the most amazing pasta concoction I've ever eaten, featuring Peg's mushrooms in a white sauce she created from scratch using the herbs from our own backyard garden here at Tara.
Why write all this down? Not simply to bore you---I don't want to forget, not any of it. This is as good as it gets.
Just before I woke up this morning I dreamed I was back in my Eagle days, and we'd just received the execute order to get ready for an impending attack. I was frantically trying to find a place to get out of my street clothes and back into a flight suit while the guys waited for me in the crew van out front. There was JB, and Steino, and Fort, and several others I haven't thought about in thirty years. I'm not sure any of them are even still alive. I have that dream periodically, am my current self back in the Fightin' Eagles, trying to convince myself that I still remember how to fly the plane but always awakening before I even make it to the cockpit ladder. I guess it's the fighter pilot analog of the "showing up for finals in a class you've never attended" dream.
But now to work.