"The Supernatural is the Natural, just not yet understood."
— Elbert Hubbard
There's a certain tyranny of purpose in this exercise each morning. What is it meant to accomplish?
Is it simply a diary of this part of our lives? I do worry that I'll forget all this, that my kids will never have known this life in the first place. How much do I remember about, say, 2014? A few spikes of activity, a trial gone sideways. Not much else. If it's not written down, it's gone.
And lately that's gotten my attention because I find my short-term memory in recent days failing me utterly. What did I walk into this room to do? What of that 2 a.m. moment of clarity that vanished by sunrise? If I've got some sort of early onset dementia, the last couple weeks have seen the first troubling signs.
Or maybe I'm just too busy, too in my own head. Maybe a little less ETOH would make a difference.
On that point, P and I seem to have reached an agreement that we'll embark on a program of deflating in lieu of investing in more capacious clothes. One's variables for such an exercise are limited: less calories in, more activity to burn them off. We already eat sparingly, and there's no processed food in this house because P never learned to love corn dogs and Kraft Dinner as did your author. We both need to exercise a little more. But the big driver for getting skinnier, vel non, lies in that bottle of cabernet we kill with supper most nights, and my hi ball glass of Jameson's with the big ice cube floating in the middle. Empty calories. All fine on the weekends, but we need to exercise and abstain during the week.
Or get bigger clothes. But let's try diet and long walks, for starters.
The predawn darkness brought a visit of existential dread for the first time since the early days of the pandemic.
This was not the usual chest pounding worry about court filing deadlines and the like; rather, I woke to a sense of impending doom, a feeling that "something wicked this way comes", to quote Macbeth.
Where'd that come from?
Maybe it was the dinner conversation last night during an otherwise wonderful afternoon and evening spent with good friends who are funny, smart, engaged. But our season as a country meant the talk drifted to how we navigate the end of democracy in the United States, where to flee, how to deal with the grief of this national moment.
If you like your bad news stirred thick with data, I highly recommend this essay from yesterday's NYT.
We spoke of these things as a cool, damp wind blew across the crystal waters of Loon Lake, a place of absolute serenity tucked in the hills an hour northwest of here. An ironic setting for talk of looming chaos.
All being of around the same age, we also mused over the health specters that haunt this season of our own lives. There were descriptions of chemotherapy, of hair loss and weight gain and wishing one was dead after the third or fourth poisoning for a purpose. Tears and a little laughter at the humbling cruelty of it all.
So maybe those demons were still knocking around in the recesses of my mind as I fell asleep.
Or maybe it was my superstitious nature as we plan for Halloween.
Yesterday we spent way too much money on a projection system so we'll have holographic ghosts in the bedroom windows in the evenings this October.
Technology has managed to bring our deepest supernatural fears to life in a way never before possible. Won't it be fun to have the undead in our windows watching us walk up the hill from supper at night?
Maybe. Peg's Indian doctor friend already won't come through the door of our house, taking seriously our tales of figures walking past and behind us as we brush our teeth in the mirror, cats talking to empty spaces in Peg's dressing room. Last night at 1 a.m. as I walked to-and-from the bathroom across that room, I stepped through a distinctly cold spot on the floor, like it was wet, but it was not. That's the room where Dean and Slane see things we don't.
So maybe our Indian friend is onto something, and we shouldn't be taunting the bhoots by projected images of what we imagine them to be. They've been fairly benign to this point.
But besides this sense of impending doom, the weekend brought a great deal of pleasure. We fired up our ridiculous Traeger smoker for the first time, and a nice customer service guy who'd moved from Mississippi to Utah seventeen years ago talked me through how to get the thing to light after welcoming me to the "Traegerhood".
The Dawgs looked tough against the Gamecocks, and the Trojans cruised to 3-0 long after I'd gone to bed.
We met friends and danced in the street to live music on the first day of the Harvest Festival (alcohol may have been a factor in our lack of inhibition), then returned to Market Street the next day to buy mushrooms from a nice hippie couple who walked the streets barefoot with their little hippie waif. We stopped at the alpaca fleece booth and asked about raising alpacas at our farm as the oldsters complained about the loud live music, and spent a substantial chunk of our afternoon trying to calculate the cost of the hats, gloves, and finger puppets P bought.
The girls arrived for the night not long after we climbed the hill from the street party, and soon the finger puppets were put to good use in an improvised puppet show based very loosely on the Wizard of Oz. The alpaca puppet was the Tin Man, and the chicken was actually a duckbilled platypus and the villain in the narrative. It's all about imagination.
We ate smoked chicken in front of the TV watching Babe, then raced down the hill when I called the ice cream place to see when they closed, hoping to pick up a treat for the grandkids, and learned we had five minutes until the teenaged staff called it a night. Tossing children in to P's new car, we hurtled down Cedar Street, spilled out a couple storefronts from the ice cream parlor, and slid through the door as they were turning the sign around to "closed".
The girls fell asleep watching Jungle Book, the 1967 animated version, which I reckon was more for P and me than for them.
The next morning there were more puppet shows until Tommy arrived to take the girls shopping, and we bumbled around Tara before jumping into the roadster to the dinner party I mentioned earlier. I found a cool road on the map that would take us up to the lake along the edge of Canisteo River, not exactly a direct route and a recipe for arriving quite late. Compounding this bit of bad planning was P's excitement at the sight of a roadside pumpkin stand outside Addison. She directed I turn around and partake of their produce, which included a massive Hubbard squash that's now lying on our kitchen counter.
Inside next to the register a guy was working on a 58 Chevy pickup that lacked an engine. His wife, obviously over this little project, suggested I ask him about his work, which I did. This in turn led to a very long, detailed tour of this love of his life for the last year. We studied every LED light he'd installed, contemplated whether a 327 or 283 would do the trick under the hood, pondered with wonder the dashboard insert he'd bought to replace the functional but dull original.
And along the way we became very late for supper, with P tugging me out the door, bags filled with gourds. We flew down the valley with the top down through some of the prettiest farm country you've ever seen, dodging tractors and Amish buggies as we went. An Amish teenager waved resignedly at me as I roared past, probably wishing he was driving a convertible with a hot date by his side rather than going "courting" and wishing his beard would fill in.
So there, I pickled all those memories I'll likely forget later.
This morning dawned clear and lovely, but the clouds are back and promise rain a little later.
We have a landscape architect stopping by in about 45 minutes to survey the disarray of our backyard and offer suggestions that should just about sop up any excess liquidity we may still have after the endless list of "little" repairs that this 173 year old house requires. Did you notice that flaking paint on the column?
And the fact that we're willing to risk penury to bring the old girl back should make the ghosts at least a little happy.
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