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Priscilla gave Max a beautiful antique glass pitcher to give to me.
Gift was well-timed: I’ve been feeling exceedingly down in the dumps the last couple of days, which is partly due to a run-in with another impossible client and partly because the weather has shifted. It’s hazy, hot, and very, very, humid. The heat index is well over 100; dew points are close to 80. Spending even five minutes outside leaves you pouring sweat. So I’ve been staying inside. And getting cabin fever.
Canceled my voter registration rounds for the week. Did not want my obituary to read, She dropped dead of heat stroke registering people to vote for Hillary -- UGH -- Clinton.
###
Priscilla and I met exactly once ten years ago at Deep Springs, and I don’t remember us talking to each other much. We kind of sniffed each other.
She’s a very tough, no-nonsense, straight-talking Arizona cowgirl who was working at the time as the cook on the ranch. I liked her because she’s a character straight out of a Larry McMurtry novel. She liked me – I assume – because I’m Max’s mother, and she thinks Max is a stand-up kid and that I had some influence over the way he’s turned out.
Did I have any influence over the way Max turned out?
I suppose I must have.
But, you know, I’ve never been able to deconstruct Max the way I can easily deconstruct almost everyone else – which is essentially to view them as characters in a novel.
I suppose that must mean I feel very close to him.
###
The beautiful antique glass pitcher would never make it intact from California to the Hudson Valley, so I told Max he could use it.
“Don’t break it,” I begged.
“I won’t!” he promised.
But care for physical possessions is not one of Max’s many sterling qualities.
###
Day before yesterday when the heat index was only 99, I took Benito to the Gunks because he’s a climber, and I’m tired of watching him play video games in the basement. Classes at the Culinary Institute ended two weeks ago; his externship at a chi chi restaurant in New Jersey doesn’t start for another two weeks. He has gotten off the sofa in front of his PlayStation a couple of times – once to make a very delicious onion soup from scratch:
Why he isn’t out there every day exploring, I don’t know, but I suppose young people don’t explore anymore – and yeah, yeah, I am aware that saying shit like that means I should probably apply for a dispatcher job in Andy Griffith’s Mayberry police department.
Anyway, climbing those steep trails in Minnewaska State Park in that heat was just awful.
On the way back, though, we took a detour into Hurley, the old Dutch village just outside Kingston, which has many, many old stone houses built 300 years or more. They’re not museums or anything like the Huguenot houses in New Paltz. People still live in them. And once a year, they open the houses up to the public:
Hurley is the town that Sojourner Truth was born in, and I’m pretty sure that stone adjunct in the back of this house was once the slave quarters – that connecting midsection looks to have been built some time in the latter half of the 20th century.
Hurley also has a spooky old graveyard that’s only accessible by a hidden footpath:
Gift was well-timed: I’ve been feeling exceedingly down in the dumps the last couple of days, which is partly due to a run-in with another impossible client and partly because the weather has shifted. It’s hazy, hot, and very, very, humid. The heat index is well over 100; dew points are close to 80. Spending even five minutes outside leaves you pouring sweat. So I’ve been staying inside. And getting cabin fever.
Canceled my voter registration rounds for the week. Did not want my obituary to read, She dropped dead of heat stroke registering people to vote for Hillary -- UGH -- Clinton.
###
Priscilla and I met exactly once ten years ago at Deep Springs, and I don’t remember us talking to each other much. We kind of sniffed each other.
She’s a very tough, no-nonsense, straight-talking Arizona cowgirl who was working at the time as the cook on the ranch. I liked her because she’s a character straight out of a Larry McMurtry novel. She liked me – I assume – because I’m Max’s mother, and she thinks Max is a stand-up kid and that I had some influence over the way he’s turned out.
Did I have any influence over the way Max turned out?
I suppose I must have.
But, you know, I’ve never been able to deconstruct Max the way I can easily deconstruct almost everyone else – which is essentially to view them as characters in a novel.
I suppose that must mean I feel very close to him.
###
The beautiful antique glass pitcher would never make it intact from California to the Hudson Valley, so I told Max he could use it.
“Don’t break it,” I begged.
“I won’t!” he promised.
But care for physical possessions is not one of Max’s many sterling qualities.
###
Day before yesterday when the heat index was only 99, I took Benito to the Gunks because he’s a climber, and I’m tired of watching him play video games in the basement. Classes at the Culinary Institute ended two weeks ago; his externship at a chi chi restaurant in New Jersey doesn’t start for another two weeks. He has gotten off the sofa in front of his PlayStation a couple of times – once to make a very delicious onion soup from scratch:
Why he isn’t out there every day exploring, I don’t know, but I suppose young people don’t explore anymore – and yeah, yeah, I am aware that saying shit like that means I should probably apply for a dispatcher job in Andy Griffith’s Mayberry police department.
Anyway, climbing those steep trails in Minnewaska State Park in that heat was just awful.
On the way back, though, we took a detour into Hurley, the old Dutch village just outside Kingston, which has many, many old stone houses built 300 years or more. They’re not museums or anything like the Huguenot houses in New Paltz. People still live in them. And once a year, they open the houses up to the public:
Hurley is the town that Sojourner Truth was born in, and I’m pretty sure that stone adjunct in the back of this house was once the slave quarters – that connecting midsection looks to have been built some time in the latter half of the 20th century.
Hurley also has a spooky old graveyard that’s only accessible by a hidden footpath:
