Two Views of the Same Frog

“Do you ever do that thing when you’re very upset where you try to visualize some place you felt utterly peaceful?” Loraine asked.

“Nah,” I said. “When I get upset, I cry.”

“Do you?” said Loraine. I couldn’t tell whether the mild upswing in her voice was surprise or approval. “I never cry. Except when one of my dogs dies.”

“Oh, I cry all the time,” I said. “At everything. At nothing. Sometimes I sit in my car and cry for absolutely no reason at all. Crying is a tremendous tension reliever. I always feel a thousand percent better afterward. Though I do try and do it only when I’m alone. Crying seems to make other people feel so uncomfortable.”

“When my grandmother was dying, I had to drive back down to Philly very fast,” Loraine said. “And I had the radio on. Some talk station. There was this woman on talking about visualization: When you’re really stressed, think about a place where you felt calm and happy. So, I tried. And the frog pond at Montgomery Place popped into my head.”

“Huh!” I said.



At first, I couldn’t see the frogs. Loraine had to point them out to me. “There’s two over there, see? At the side, near those reeds. And one right there on that lily leaf.”

I had to look for a while.

Finally, I saw it. It was the exact same color as the lily pad it sat on.



Then it jumped. And turned a completely different color.



The little frog was chameleon-like. It had turned the color of its surroundings.

Both colors were green. But I almost couldn’t understand how that could be.

The colors were so different. There has to be some kind of failure in a language that categorizes these two colors as the same color: It's an Eskimo language that's forgotten the other 16 names for snow.

Protective mimicry.



It was a perfect day. In paradise, every day is like yesterday.

First, we went to the Italian garden at Bard. The Italian garden was once part of an estate called Blithewood.

I’m not a fan of the accompanying mansion:



It’s not that hideous. In fact, it was designed by the same architect who designed Edith Wharton’s Berkshire mansion, The Mount. I just don’t like it.

It does have a very pretty ghost story attached to it.



The mansion was built by someone called Captain Andrew Christian Zabriskie, descended from a Polish gentleman who hitched a ride on the Dutch ship De Vos in 1652, following the end of the Thirty Years War, (Hardly anyone thinks about the Thirty Years War today but it essentially wiped out central Europe for 200 years.) Like the descendants of many early settlers to the New World, the Zabriskie clan grew fabulously wealthy.

And at the time Andrew Zabriskie build Blythewood, he owned much of the real estate in New York City.

The story is that Andrew Zabriskie had four beautiful daughters. And commissioned statues representing each of his four daughters to be placed at various spots around the Blithewood estate.

But then, one of the daughters fell out the window of a hotel in New York City!

And it was never determined whether her fall was an accident, a suicide, or a murder.

So her statue was taken down.

Once a year—on her birthday—the statue reappears!

I’ve walked around plenty through the Blithewood grounds, and I have never seen any sign of these statues.

Still! A pretty story, no? Though I don’t think I can use it. Blithewood is one of those rare Hudson River Valley mansions that has no connection to the eeeee-vil Livingstons.



Montgomery Place is just a hop, skip, and a jump away from Blithewood.

I don’t know enough about architecture to speak intelligently about why I find this mansion so much more pleasing to the eye than Blithewood. Except that I do.

Montgomery Place these days is also owned by Bard College.

Bard College is a kind of finishing school for the wayward progeny of the obscenely rich.

Donald Fagen and Walter Becker went to school there. I am a big Steely Dan fan, but I never thought Annandale existed outside Fagen and Becker’s imaginations, so when I first moved to the Hudson Valley and discovered Annandale was a real place and that My Old School was based on a real drug bust, I got very excited!

The Poughkeepsie DA who arranged the bust was none other than G. Gordon Liddy who later became famous as one of Nixon’s Watergate plumbers.

Liddy died not so very long ago and is buried in Poughkeepsie.

I keep meaning to find G. Gordon Liddy's grave and pee on it.

But I keep forgetting.



Bard College is like the most fabulously beautiful campus you can possibly imagine.

I am fairly certain Brakebills in The Magicians was modeled after Bard.

Incidentally, the college’s name is not meant to celebrate epic poetry.

Samuel Bard was George Washington’s personal physician and one of the great 18th-century landowners hereabouts. He loaned his name to a great many places in the Hudson River Valley.

Dr. Bard is buried maybe 50 yards away from where I grow my tomatoes and peppers and basil.

I have no desire to pee on his grave.