Back in the panhandle this morning, after landing in Pensacola yesterday afternoon. The burst of warm air on the jetway was the first sign I was back in the South, although P says it's almost as warm back in Corning.
As I made my way down the escalator past baggage claim, a little league baseball team was milling around in t-shirts and matching caps. The largest among them was a lumbering mass of man with a scarf pulled defiantly down below his chin, even as his minions wore their little masks over their faces.
Yep, I'm back in the South.
I rode up in an elevator with the standard Covid warnings posted above the buttons, reminding us to wear masks and not bunch up. Then it said, "Thank you for understanding."
Really? "Thank you for understanding"? As if it's an affront to ask someone politely not to be a complete jackass and spray aerosol badness all over everyone else in the elevator. Up north the same sign might say, "Together we'll beat this." Not down here. No together. Nothing to beat because it's all a hoax, and somehow they talked Grandma into dying in agony to help Biden win the election, even though we all know she would've voted for Trump if she hadn't drowned in her own snot.
Dial it back, Donk.
Later Drew and I went to supper together at the Mexican restaurant directly across from my hotel. We ate too much. We laughed. We told stories. The place was crowded, although they'd done a good job of spreading out tables. At the next one, a corpulent lady with purple hair and corpulent family situated around a table covered in the debris of a south-of-the border debauch, featuring an empty thirty-two ounce margarita glass in front of her, loudly complained to her husband about the damned service in this place as he tried not to make eye contact, fumbling with the check, and the poor waiter in the grossly understaffed place walked by pretending not to hear. Classy.
The end of the public portion of my evening consisted of one last elevator ride, now with a bowling ball of a young African-American woman and her pretzel stick of a significant other, in sagging shorts, cocked baseball cap with flat brim and shiny label still attached, and unlaced red-and-white Air Jordans. They were having a conversation; or, more accurately, he was explaining to her that he had decided she had nothing to say that he cared to hear. Or at least that seemed to be the general message, delivered in a vernacular peppered with the word "Ho", as in Santa's jolly laugh. No one was laughing in the elevator, however. She kept shooting glances at me over her mask (his face being completely uncovered). Was it anger, shame, or embarrassment at his behavior I was seeing? Maybe a little of all three.
Ah, let's go back in time. I promised today to finish yesterday's description no one read about our trip to Pittsburgh. After our drink on the ridge Saturday afternoon, we went back to the room for a respite and a nap (this was supposed to be a mini-vacation, after all), then walked back up the Allegheny toward Nicky's, a Thai restaurant our helpful concierge raved was his favorite in the neighborhood.
Yankees, it seems, know little about Thai food. I say that, and yet the Thai restaurant in Corning is really wonderful. I guess when your customer base travels all over the world on business, you have to step up your game. This particular offering in Pittsburgh was forgettable if not awful--we thought enough of the meal to bring home half of it for supper the following evening.
Sunday morning was clear and crisp. We departed to the east, winding our way out of the hills surrounding Pittsburgh and into rolling countryside on our way to State College for lunch. The land there is beautiful, with purple mountains in the distance and the occasional smokestack along the horizon telling you a river runs nearby. A disturbing number of Trump flags still line the roadway, reminding us that in a number of ways Pennsylvania is sort of the Alabama of the upper middle Atlantic, only with Philly to temper its reactionary bent.
State College is the home of the Penn State Nittany Lions, USC's sometimes football foil. The campus is lovely in parts, and really huge. The Penn State system boasts nearly 100,000 students, nearly half of whom attend school here.
They have a statue of a lion of which they're quite proud. We broke our vow against lines to wait for our turn and snap a photo.
Note that your Floridians were in jackets, while the locals were sporting shorts and lots of bare midriffs. Thick blood, I guess.
Making our way back down the hill to their picturesque main drag, we took our brunch at the Corner Room, a State College institution for nearly a hundred years.
The drinks all seemed sickly sweet, the gyro was wrapped in a tortilla, and the waitress boasted ropy veins on chiseled forearms and an assembly of unfortunate tattoos. The choices people make.
Peg warned against the onion rings. "You'll regret it," she warned. I ordered a large basket that led to a screaming case of heartburn right through the next morning. I'll never learn. The choices people make.
The drive back to Corning from there featured bright spring skies and a highway that follows the west fork of the Susquehanna, a river that takes us right up to the edge of Corning before snaking along past the sites of so many other adventures described on this blog.
The warmth and sun when we arrived in Corning led to a long walk through the neighborhood, our first since it turned cold nearly five months ago. The trees are beginning to change color, the first hint that buds are right around the corner. We had a glass of wine outside on the porch, watching nice kids in shirtsleeves run past on adventures that seemed to involve attempting to climb those same trees. A peaceful end to a busy weekend.
I may go radio silent here for a bit. Mediation today, overnight with friends tonight in Santa Rosa Beach, Covid vaccine in PC tomorrow following by meetings all day and then happy hour with one dear friend and supper with Son #5. And so it goes.
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