mallorys_camera | Red Hook and That Twilight Zone Episode Where the Bad Guys Stole the Gold

It rained and rained and rained yesterday, and I sat inside feeling logier and logier and logier.

I did some paying work, but my heart wasn’t in it, and the work went s-l-o-w-l-y.

Mostly I felt melancholy. I wasn’t sure why. My brain was broadcasting poignant musical scores from a dozen different movies I’d forgotten I’d ever seen. Was it just that old thing of moods being determined by the weather? Or was there some proximal cause?

When it finally cleared up in the late afternoon, I had no physical energy whatsoever and decided to go for a drive instead of a walk.

I had a hankering to see the meat vending machines. (Don’t ask me why!) The meat vending machines live in Hudson:

God knows why the meat vending machines exercise such a peculiar fascination.

But they do.

###

When I got as far as Red Hook, though, I decided I didn’t want to drive anymore. I had a headache—probably an early symptom of covid-19, right? So I was doomed!

And even if I wasn’t doomed, I was feeling generally dispirited.

Red Hook is the town that Bard students used to escape to in the Great Before when they couldn’t stand to be on campus anymore.

It has a great many cute little eateries, now all desperate beggars wheedling you to please, please, please buy takeout:

I went for a walk. I carried a mask, but I needn’t have bothered since the streets were absolutely deserted.

Later, driving home, I saw a few locals out walking, all maskless. They looked sullen. Dutchess County has had about 4,000 cases and 132 deaths but the stats are confounders since the infected were mostly folk fleeing the contagion epicenter in the Big City, 100 miles to the south.

Once home, L and C invited me to have dinner with them, and I couldn’t figure out a polite way to say No even though I suspected that given the mood I was in, I wouldn’t be able to add much to the table.

But conversation mostly consisted of C reciting old Twilight Zone plots, and since I know every old Twilight Zone episode practically by heart, I was much more of a value-add than I had any right to be.

Then Neighbor Ed called to tell me all about the coyote he'd seen that day in the Vanderbilt Park. Rain or no rain, he'd gone out walking!

And I went to bed.

Today it’s sunny and beautiful again, and I keep flashing on that sequence of scenes from Tom’s Midnight Garden: First Tom sees the great old spruce tree crash in a lightening storm, but the next night, he returns to the garden and sees the fir tree standing again—because his time is sequential but magic time is elastic…

###

I have no idea what “reopening” means, and nobody else seems to know, either.

I do know I have an enormous amount of work that I need to accomplish today in addition to tromping and gardening, so I better get on it.