Ellen

Somehow, Ellen found out that my birthday is fast approaching, so the Girl Squad meetup last night turned into a birthday dinner.

The Parkview has decent cheeseburgers, so that's what I always order.

I like the Parkview. Maybe it's because I'm deep in my various Larry McMurtry reads, but it occurs to me that Wallkill is a lot like McMurtry's mythical West Texas Thalia—a lot of deeply weird individuals pretending to be walkin' that Law-and-Order highway. I would actually kinda like them if their xenophobia was not a strain of rabies. But as it is, they're dangerous.

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Anyway, Ellen knows absolutely everyone in Wallkill, so absolutely everyone came up to our table—from Joe, the former Wallkill Town Board member who lives in a 19th-century boarding house still decorated with the original daguerreotypes to Steve, who runs the local transfer station (where I haul my weekly garbage since Icky is too cheap to spring for a garbage service) & who never charges me: Jest don't tell them people down at City Hall, 'kay darlin'?

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Ellen and I have an unlikely friendship. She doesn't read & I'd say she doesn't actually hear about 50% of what comes out of my mouth, but then, I don't really care if people hear what I say since I'm mostly saying it for the benefit of an invisible audience that lives in my head.

She won my fealty & devotion 4-Evah by coming to dig my car out of the ice last winter and rolling down her car window on her way out to tell me, "I got your back."

Apparently, I did something similar for her—though I can't remember what it was. Maybe offering to go with her to the vet when she had to put her much-loved dog down?

Anyway, we are bonded.

And we both hate Trump—a rarity in Wallkill.

So, maybe that's part of it.