Friends, Butterflies, Gardens

Busy, busy, busy.

Met up with the fabulous thoughtsbykat for indifferent diner food and a tromp around the FDR estate where the park rangers have resurrected Eleanor Roosevelt’s famous victory garden. Their cucumbers and cantaloupes didn’t succumb to squash bugs! Unlike mine!!

We channeled puddleshark and chased a monarch butterfly across a bed of zinnias:



We also made the acquaintance of this fine fellow—possibly the largest grasshopper I have ever seen:



thoughtsbykat got to know Winston Churchill a little better:



Thence we repaired to the FDR Presidential Library Giftshop where all sorts of wondrous things are for sale, including highball glasses embossed with maps of the Hudson Valley—very useful if you get so drunk you forget which side of the river Saugerties is on.

I may have to get a couple.

Came home, worked for a few hours in a desultory fashion, feeling unaccountably melancholy. I don’t know why it just suddenly occurred to me that I wouldn’t be able to call B up and rant about the stupidity of the Democratic Presidential Debates. But it did.

Then it was time to serve food at the garden’s annual Harvest Dinner!

As it turns out, Claude is actually a middlingly Famous Chef who some years back, wrote the definitive book on food from his native Normandy.

He also has a tragedy.

This I learned because when you live in a small town, everybody knows everybody. I was having tea with Linda and Pat one afternoon, and Claude’s name came up.

“He had a daughter with cystic fibrosis, you know,” Pat said. Pat got her NP from Yale University, but after her kids were born, decided to work below her qualifications and became a nurse in the Hyde Park school system.

“Cystic fibrosis!” I said.

“Lovely, lovely girl,” Pat said. “And smart! She was the student body president at FDR High School the year she graduated. I wonder whatever happened to her?”

“Well,” I said. “Unless she got a lung transplant, she’s dead.”

I Googled it, and as it turned out, she got a lung transplant and she’s dead.

More proof—if anyone needs it—that you never, ever know what personal tragedies people are sitting on.

Once again, I almost passed out in the Parish dining room. Maybe I’m just such an ungodly person that sanctity is my Kryptonite.

But James brought me a beer, and that seemed to have a reviving effect.

James turns out to be a mega-rich captain of industry, whose consulting firm is a second-tier McKinsey or Toomy. He divides his year between the quaint and scenic Hudson Valley and Houston where he runs his firm and professes at a local university. He was quite interesting to talk to, and I quite envy him his lifestyle, which seems to consist of endless trips with his wife to Montreal and local wineries.

Anyway, the food was quite fabulous thought the plating—big Dollar Store tin bins—may have lacked something:



Every single bit of it except for the pork grown in our garden.

I’ll miss the garden.

But unlike Ben and Claude’s daughter, it will be there next year.