![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_camera
Back from Ithaca, where I had the most fabulous time!
And fabulous time before that seeing Barbara Angell.
Plus—Black Chicken isn't dead! Icky had simply stashed her in a box in the basement and neglected to tell me, so when I saw the chicken coop was empty, I jumped to the wrong conclusions. While I was in Ithaca, Icky went back to NYC (yay!) but texted me this morning: Can you check on...?
Naturally, the latch on the chicken coop doesn't work, so when I went out to check on her after he texted, the coop door had blown open, and she wasn't in the coop. Spent half an hour searching and finally found her hiding under the thick rhododendron bushes in front of the house. Recent trauma has refined her stealth.
I fed her tortilla treats and returned her to the coop. Barricaded the coop with a wooden beam.
She lives!!!
Smart Black Chicken! Indominable Black Chicken!
Barbara & I met in nursing school, which means we've been BFF for (ulp!) 45 years or so. The picture above was taken when we were young & gorgeous. The picture below is what we look like today and includes Michael with whom Barbara hasn't lived for 15 years but to whom she remains married because healthcare insurance, intertwined finances, shared offspring, and general good will.
I always liked Michael who is very bright but also very quirky. You could never be certain what was going to come out of his mouth. Once we were talking about psychotic hallucinations, and he told me, "Oh, I hear voices all the time. I just don't pay any attention to them."
What you can't tell from the photo above is how unbelievably good-looking Michael was in his youth. Bright blond hair, lean windsurfer's body with that beautiful Adonis belt musculature, burning blue eyes with that fierce berserker glint.
They're here because fashionista Aemilia, their daughter, is marrying a boy from High Falls. We met at my beloved Gardiner's Bakehouse, which had actually closed for the day, but the incredibly wonderful owner opened her doors for me and gifted us with free iced coffee and scrumptious biscotti. And then we talked and talked and talked—about Aetna Street where we were young & careless, about the house in Santa Rosa where Barbara grew up with its row of rusting Mercedes sedans, and Barbara's three sisters who grew up to be shrews, and my misadventures, and Barbara's recent hiking trip to Patagonia. We talked for four hours till the first fireflies came out.
Next morning I took off to Ithaca.
Big, big, big news: RTT's in love!
Now, RTT has had girlfriends before, but he's never seemed to be deeply involved with them, and for that I blamed myself since, as his mother, wasn't I the representative of the Feminine? It was my fault that he was incapable of intimacy! My horrible relationship with his father had conditioned RTT to look at relationships with women as some sort of mine-trapped La Brea Tar Pit.
But apparently, this is not the case!
I had met Willow the month before and spent a couple of hours chatting with her. She is one of RTT's apartment mates. She's quite an adventuress—originally from the Florida panhandle, traveled the country in her van with her dog Yuki, doing agricultural work. Marijuana cultivation (I suspect but didn't confirm) is what brought her to the Finger Lakes.
I'd fallen in love with Willow completely after RTT told the famous story of how I did karaoke with this song—
—
"-and she sings N-word to Brendan, right? Crazy, right?" RTT laughed. "I was so embarrassed—"
"Hey! It's part of the song!" I said. "I mean, I wouldn't use the word conversationally because that would be rude, but if I'm quoting it as part of a lyric, yeah, I'm gonna use it! I don't believe in imbuing words with magical destructive qualities. I support free, uncensored speech! And good manners!"
"Hundred percent agree!" Willow said, and we beamed at each other the way that people do when they're together on the minority side of a highly controversial topic. True bonding moment!
Neither Molly nor Allynn could put me up on this trip, so when I told RTT on the phone I had to come up to drop off Brian's enormous stash of camping equipment because I didn't have any place to store it, I said, "I'll have to crash on your couch, RTT—"
"No, no, no," Willow said. "You can crash in my room—"
"But where will you sleep?" I asked.
They laughed.
Oh!
"Willow and I are, uh, dating," said RTT.
Willow is fabulous in every conceivable way and I could not be more pleased with RTT's choice.
Other than that, I watched World Cup games and played trivia at Personal Best, which really is like that bar in Cheers where everybody knows your name. Our trivia team—dubbed Moms' Playdate—came in second! And it was a tough trivia game!
On Wednesday night, I went to watch RTT at City Council:
And then around midnight, the kids took off for the Knicks parade in NYC.
The friends group all went down in separate cars but miraculously somehow managed to find each other in a sea of two million fans:
How adorable are they, huh?
I slept the night in their fabulous apartment—which really is my ideal dream of an urban apartment, the upstairs of the State Theater, built in 1915 when Ithaca was one of the main sites of the nascent silent film industry. It's on the National Register of Historic Places. Look at the photo closely, and you will see Naruto the cat and Yuki the dog who get on like brother and sister. A blended family.
In the morning, I walked Yuki and then took off for the Hudson Valley.
It was a great trip and really did confirm that my deep malaise of the last few months really is this place. So now I must focus on marshaling the resources and doing what needs to be done to get out of this place.
no subject
Date: 2026-06-19 11:45 pm (UTC)"stashed her in a box in the basement"...!! I mean, I'm glad Black Chicken lives, but WTF?