[continued from previous entry]
A nice dinner. The girls seemed to decide they liked having me there, once their food had been shoveled down, they came and went from the table, leaving me, G. and M. to talk about whatever we wanted to talk about (me hoovering down rice & beans the entire time). Which wound up centering on my first cross-country trip, immediately post-college, me making the trip when I wound up passing three weeks with G. and his parents in their house on a lake in southern California. Evenings were spent in L.A. tossing down Mexican chow and vat-sized glasses of margaritas, days were spent hanging about house/lake or running around L.A. being tourists. At night I slept in the guest cabin, in a room lined with packed bookshelves, staying up to all hours reading books that caught my attention (the only one I remember: a volume of letters from Groucho Marx to his daughter -- hard to put down, packed with laugh lines). G.'s father -- now deceased -- was, essentially, Disney records. Turns out the company's going to honor him in a ceremony sometime soon, G. will be flying out to attend.
When I stop and think about it, it's amazing how many parents of friends took me in and put up with me in earlier years. Sometimes for a night or two, sometimes for weeks – displays of kindness and generosity that went leagues beyond the call of duty.
Rain continued to fall. G. had to go to a meeting at an out-of-business theater he and a group of people were attempting to resuscitate, I grabbed my laptop and followed, figuring I'd find a café with wi-fi to sit and do some electronic scribbling. Wound up at a Starbucks where it turned out they charged big money for wireless access. I didn't feel like handing over a pile of shekels for an hour of online time, so I sat and simply wrote as wave after wave of local teenagers poured into the place and back out into the night, the air smelling of rain and coffee.
G.'s meeting took place a couple of blocks away in the theater, a short stumble down the main drag. We'd arranged to meet out in front -- when the time came, I packed up my laptop, made the short trip, found no sign of G. at the rendezvous point. A tug at the theater's doors showed one of them to be open, I went inside to see what was what. What I found: the meeting still in process, G. and a bunch of other folks up on the stage talking away, deep into a lot of theater world hot air. I pulled out something to read, waited a while. When it became apparent they might go on well into the night, I took off, made the hike back to the house where M. and the girls seemed surprised to see someone other than the fourth member of the family walk in the front door. Then not so surprised to hear that the meeting seemed nowhere near wrapping up for the night, G. being a master shmoozer who can go on for hours in a meeting-type sitch.
He eventually returned, household life wound down for the evening, I retired to my room, turned on the TV for a while, turned it off, switched to a book, eventually turned off the light and passed out, the sound of the crowd at a nearby Friday night football game coming and going, like the faint sounds of waves on a beach.
Woke up with first light, could feel I wouldn't be returning to sleep, gave up, got out my laptop. G. appeared not long after, sleeping in apparently not something that happens often in that household. His footsteps came up the stairs, went into the other third-floor room, where the home's computer lives. I follwed him in there, we got blabbing, time passed.
G. had to take one of the girls to a violin lesson, they dressed, ate, disappeared. M. and the other girl were going to drive out to a birthday party out on Long Island. I waited till they'd gone (thank-you's and good-bye's flying in the minutes leading up to their departure) and the bathroom was finally free. Showered, etc. G. returned, we went out to breakfast, making the trip on foot, Georgiana talking nonstop, providing a hyper-detailed rundown of a story she loved. We found the breakfast joint, claimed a table, a big, beautiful black woman took our orders. Georgiana requested a big plate of blueberry pancakes with whipped cream. It arrived, she ate a few paltry bites, left the rest. G. and I ordered 'Mexican omelets,' mine seemed to get better with each bite, until I found myself eating it faster and faster, getting happier by the minute. (In general, if someone cooks for me, I'm predisposed to bliss -- if the chow is at all decent, I experience a kind of joy that is positively indecent.)
Post-breakfast glut: a wander along the street, me dragging G. and Georgiana briefly into a café where I inhaled an espresso so quickly G. appeared alarmed. A stop into the town library, a great little place (with a room full of computers free to use, and wi-fi access for those with a laptop, also free of charge) -- the kind of institution I'd be all over were I a town resident. A stop into a wildly garish shop dealing almost entirely in Halloween and Christmas stuff -- G. practically had to drag Georgiana into it, then practically had to drag her out of it when his interest quickly waned. A stop into a thrift shop where every single article of clothing was on sale for 25 cents (me picking up a necktie emblazoned with teeny soccer players, to be given to a friend -- a gift I suspect the recipient will both love and hate).
[continued in entry of September 27]
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Autumn rainbow, northern Vermont:
España, te echo de menos.
rws 7:46 PM [+]
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