"Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food."
― Hippocrates
I blame the beautiful Peggy Bowen for today's late start, which paradoxically began with a very early start.
Peg wanted to go to the condo after work yesterday, to have supper overlooking the lake after delivering a pile of stuff and things she'd purchased for the place. So I knocked off a little early, and we drove up the lovely valley of the Cohocton River to the Town of Cohocton, then to Naples where we stopped at our favorite old Victorian hotel for a cocktail, then up the hill along the western shore of Canandaigua Lake, arriving at the Cliff a little after five.
And yes, the view was worth it.
But when bedtime arrived we were forced to set a very early alarm so Peg could be to work in Elmira at 6:30. When my phone startled me awake, I had a lot of trouble transitioning out of that hazy mind that had been busy dreaming of something or other. These waking moments are actually the source of some of my biggest breakthroughs, before the analytical part of my brain tells the other to get out of the way as I slog through the day's demands.
I gazed at the ceiling, painted oddly gold as part of Dio's renovation of the place.
This must be what it's like to be some sort of Celtic demigod, a leprechaun awakening in his golden cave somewhere along the Irish coast.
"Stalactites. That's what this room needs. Or is it stalagmites?"
"Stalagmites point up. I think you mean stalactites," Peggy counseled.
While still in this brain fog I soon found myself in literal fog as we wound down the hill in the predawn shadows toward Corning. Peg slept, and I pondered on how beautiful and still the moment felt, farms devoid of activity and fields just starting to glow as the sky grew lighter by around five. Then on the winding interstate following the Cohocton to where it meets the Canisteo and becomes the Chemung, which itself then turns into a branch of the Susquehanna, then driving past the Gaffer tower into Corning.
We really are what we consume, and it's not just our alimentary tract. Every day when I'm up here I'm surrounded with breathtaking countryside and hills, and some of the kindest people on the planet. Three pride flags for every Trump 2024 banner. Roadside vegetable stands with an honor box to pay for produce, all unattended. We've kidded that in the South if you tried that, someone would not only steal the produce and the cash box, but probably the stand itself.
In some ways the locals are kind of dull, and their cooking borders on inedible, but pretty much every moment in the Southern Tier and the Finger Lakes we're bathed in Americana at its very best. And we start to heal.
Meanwhile in Louisiana they've signed into law a measure mandating that the Ten Commandments be posted in every public school classroom, and the governor has quipped that he can't wait to be sued. A house ethics committee heard testimony that the congressman in our adjoining panhandle district paid for sex with prostitutes, and engaged in quid pro quo corruption in exchange for gifts. They love him in Florida's First!
And at this very moment traffic crawls along Back Beach Road in sweltering heat, taillights flanked on either side by ugly chain restaurants and massive apartment buildings recently constructed to house the massive labor force required to clean hotel pools and dish processed poison to vacationing evangelicals from Alpharetta.
You can have it.
Oh yeah, I bet you're wondering about the reason for today's late start, given that we were up at 4:30. Once P was out the door, I fell dead asleep until after eight, struggling to emerge from a nightmare that I was being forced to re-take the MPRE, the lawyer ethics exam, and couldn't find a place to sit down and fill in the bubbles without encountering a blaring television or people walking in and out of the room talking loudly. Not sure what that was all about.
So I'm about an hour behind schedule, and need to get on with it. Blessedly there are no phone conferences until mid-afternoon, allowing me to dig into my ever-growing pile of drafting projects.
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