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Wednesday, July 26, 2006 Two days ago, returning from Montpelier on a classically spectacular north country July afternoon -- the kind of day that begins making up for the long months of Vermont winter -- as I drove back up this hill's gravel road, I saw my downhill neighbor, Mo, out watering flowers and tomatoes. Wearing loose, droopy jeans, his 84-year-old body naked from the waist up, eyes covered with wrap-around sunglasses that wouldn't look out of place on Keanu Reeves. I pulled over, got out, visited for a while. We checked out buckets of tomato plants that lined the lawn by the road, the plants growing long and leggy, branches with small tomatoes stretching in all directions, threatening chaos. Mo had gone up behind the house earlier to find some support stakes, a bunch of candidates lay piled in the grass by the buckets, ex-saplings ready to do service in the name of summer salads. Mo then showed me some unusual flowers his live-in sweetie, Barb, has cultivated -- exotic plants with big, lush blossoms, some in buckets, other tucked away among shrubs, flowering bushes, day lilies. We retired to the porch to sit for a while, talked about this and that until Barb returned from an errand run, sitting down with us on the porch to page through a copy of the Rutland Herald she'd picked up. Once finished with that, she maneuvered her bare feet through the dog poop mine field that passes as their front lawn, began investigating the future tomato-plant stakes, poking one or two into a bucket as Mo aimed tongue-in-cheek counsel her way, offering to cut down a tree if the current stakes didn't satisfy, asking if she needed a shovel to get them into the dirt, upgrading that (when her only response was stifled laughter) to a ten-pound sledgehammer. At which point she waved a menacing finger in our direction, telling Mo to quiet down. Just two kids in love (one in his ninth decade, the other in her eighth). During that return ride from Montpelier, two big 18-wheelers had roared by me in the opposite direction, one right after the other, rigs looking like big, muscular, elongated dumptrucks. The second whipped past, I heard the hard clink of a small rock hitting the windshield. Saw no stone, saw no sign of damage, continued driving home, finding no evidence of anything wrong. Next morning, as I backed the car out of the garage, a crack caught the morning sunlight, a good six inches long, starting at the lower left edge of the glass, extending out and up. Just like that, as if it had grown overnight. I made the drive into town, noticed at some point that the fissure seemed to be growing. Finding a couple of marks in the glass as reference points, I kept an eye on it as the miles slid by -– sure enough, the bugger was expanding, its length increasing by close to an inch during the trip into town, another half-inch on the way back. Six or so years back, on a drive back here from the Hudson Valley, I made a fast stopover in Springfield, Massachusetts, where some nitwit apparently saw something he or she liked in my parked car, me off getting some chow. I heard the car alarm, when I sprinted back out to the lot, I found people standing around, the rear window broken, shards of safety glass everywhere, glittering like a ragged galaxy of low-rent daytime stars. No one had seen the perp. -- I got my chow, finished the long return trip home, got the window repaired the next day (the insurance company, bless 'em, covering the entire cost of a surprisingly expensive bill). On getting back to the house yesterday, I called a couple of local auto glass shops, expecting an estimate in the same inflated neighborhood. They surprised me with quotes substantially more reasonable, even offering to drive out here and do the work. I made arrangements, hung up, pleased. This morning: just before I headed off to Montpelier for the a.m. hours, a truck backed into the driveway, a nice woman dumped a cord and a half of wood in front of one of the garage doors, one more step in the process of preparing for the cold season. In the cab of the truck, a teeny dog stared out at me, the spitting image of the little guy from Frasier Soon after: me in Montpelier, on the way to the gym. I park on a shady backstreet, lock the car, begin the several-block hike to what passes for the teeny capital city's downtown. I round the first corner where I encounter an older gent -- tall, slim, white-haired with a scraggly white beard, dressed in rumpled jeans and khaki shirt. Bent forward, upper torso at a 45 degree angle to his hips, hands in his back pockets. His gaze drifting around as he stood talking to himself. I say, "Hey," as I passed, his eyes swerved in my direction, immediately veering away to study sky, sidewalk, passing cars and whatever else registered on his seriously abstracted radar. At the gym, I enter behind another older guy -- also tall, also white-haired, but hefty, beardless, walking with a cane. He heads to the elevator, I skip up the stairs and down the hall to the locker room, begin pulling off clothes, etc. A couple of minutes later, cane dude appears, rounds the corner toward the toilets, disappears into a stall where he settles in and begins releasing clouds of mustard gas strong enough to burn the facial hair off anyone unfortunate enough to venture into the part of the locker room. Whoooeee! Finished up with sweaty activity, stepped back out into July sunshine and blessed fresh air. Went to my insurance agent to find out about coverage of the windshield work, found out they'll only cover part of the job, but since we're talking about a mighty reasonable price, I'm happy. Tomorrow morning, the auto glass gnomes come and present me with a brand spanking new windscreen. And the last days of July roll on. España, te echo de menos. rws 6:44 PM [+]
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