Of RTT, New (to Me) Computers, and Sharon Springs

Fabulous road trip to Tburg to visit RTT. We’re actually getting along really well these days, which pleases me no end. Kind of like he turned 20 and bam! We were buddies again.

I chauffeured him around on various errands, and we talked about politics, his childhood in Monterey, his post-graduation plans, the wooly adelgid’s war on hemlocks.

“One of my favorite parts of the California trip was actually watching you and Max have that fight,” he told me.

“Really?” I said.

“Yeah! Because it happened, but then we all had a terrific night together afterwards, and I thought, ‘Right! We’re a family.’ ‘Cause only families get angry and then let it go like that. You know, I almost missed my flight back to New York – Max didn’t want to drive me to the airport, so I had to take BART.”

“Well, I would have made Max take you to the airport, but I got dropped off first. Because I didn’t want to be late to the airport!”

“I didn’t miss it, though.”

“Right. But remember that time you got so mad at me in the airport in Philadelphia? You wanted to stop at a Chipotle’s; I wanted to get to the gate! Anyway, that’s because I have missed flights because I was dillydallying, and it’s a real drag when you end up waiting 12 hours to get rebooked!”

Cautionary moral tale inserted into love fest – hey! I am his mother.

He’s doing well – balancing the internship at The Museum of the Earth with construction work, so he’s making a little money. Seems in awfully good spirits.

“He mentioned Justin’s birthday this year, but he didn’t get upset over it,” Ben said. “Called Jason” – Justin’s brother – “They hung out.”

So the angst and anger over Justin’s suicide is finally processed, and he’s come out on the other side. Good.

Jason got popped for a DUI, which made me kind of sad. I think it was Justin’s DUI that drove Justin over the edge.

“Unlike Justin, Jason actually dealt with the DUI," Ben said. "Went to court. Took his medicine.” Ben laughed. “Jason actually said to Robin, ‘How come out of all of our posse, you’re the only one who hasn’t had a DUI?’ Robin just looked owlish and smiled.”

“Robin’s the only one who hasn’t had a DUI because Robin doesn’t drive!” I said.

“Right," Ben said. "But maybe that’s why Robin doesn’t drive."

###

Ben and I got along very well together, too. We had our usual deep, wide-ranging chats and watched Peter Weir’s Witness together – a perfect movie in just about every way. Impossible love!

When I left, he handed me a 15-inch MacBook – “Here. It’s got Yosemite installed on it.”

I was dumbfounded. This was awfully generous of him.

The laptop I'd been using – I set up the new one this morning – worked perfectly, but the operating system was so antiquated that I couldn't run most browsers on it. Chrome wouldn't run on it; Safari would barely run on it. I ended up using iCab, which kept crashing and burning. I’d mentioned this to Ben. Not as any kind of serious complaint – it’s not that big a deal to me if I have to close and relaunch a browser during a single Internet session; it's not as though time is of the essence: I'm not disarming explosives. I figured I’d buy a new computer in a couple of months after I finish doing all the road trips I want to do this summer (which cost $$$.) Though it did kind of piss me off that the big tech companies were no longer build in redundancy into their browsers for users of older operating systems. Back in the day when I was designing websites, the sign of a good designer was someone who designed products that looked as good in IE3 as it did on whatever the latest browser was. You wanted to make sure that everyone could access your website.

Anyway, very generous and completely unexpected of him. I guess I'll use the old laptop to store digital photographs.

“You could take out the hard drive,” Ben said. “Then when you wanted to see the photos, you could plug the hard drive into this computer!”

“But why would I want to do that?” I asked.

“Well… Because it’s what people do.”

Oh.



Of course, I wondered briefly what I always wonder briefly when I visit Tburg: What would it be like if Ben and I got back together?

We get along so well!

But really, who knows if we get along that well? Ben has a great gift for intimacy, an enormous talent for broadcasting on that secret one-to-one channel. He does it with me; he does it with other people. If we got back together as a couple, he’d get tired of doing it and all the Bad Behavior would reemerge.

No, we’re much better off as friends. We’re very good as friends. We even have a road trip to Saranac Lake planned for the beginning of August.




I took the long way to Tburg. I hate driving thruways; I only take them if I have to make a long trip in winter. In the summer, I always take back roads.

I also hate driving through Binghamton, the great transit hub connecting all travel along the Southern Tier. Binghamton thruways have been under construction for close to a decade now. I invariably miss my lane there, end up getting lost in Binghamton – horrible mistake since Binghamton is a singularly charmless town. Even Cortland is better. It’s nothing to me to add 50, 75 miles to a trip if I can avoid Binghamton.

So I took U.S. 20 all the way from Columbia Country through Leatherstocking Country – a fascinating drive since it took me through all sorts of weird little towns that have been dying since the 19th century. Weirdest of all was Sharon Springs, a prosperous resort town right up until the Great Depression. Hotels and bathhouses from that era still standing but hugely dilapidated. Must go back and explore it! (Although the abandoned hotel below is actually not in Sharon Springs but in Truxton.)