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Cooking Potatoes
I half nuked 5 medium baking potatoes, although half boiling or half baking them is better, then I sliced them into medallions and tossed them into a pan with a liberal amount of olive oil and butter in which already were sautéing a half a onion and two cloves of chopped garlic. The pan was heaped high, a veritable mound of potato medallions, and I had to be careful upon the tossing not to let them spill over onto the stove top, perhaps to be lost forever under a burner, to commune with other bits of petrified food like loose change under a bed pretending to be covered with mold that turns out to be, in the end, simply, dust bunnies.
I lowered the heat and went up to the bighouse to check my email. I had missed the hearty breakfast I needed and had eaten instead two cinnamon rolls and coffee. That had burned off before I even thought about going out to perform chores in the fifteen degree windchill. It was supposed to warm up a little so I would just wait on it some. I checked my email again. Responded to one or two.
It’s cold here. I later in the evening talked to a Canadian writer who will perform cat and looking after houses duties in my absence and she said the cold didn’t bother her until it got below zero but she was saying that in my living room with coat all the way buttoned up and toboggan still pulled low over her ears. I’m just saying.
Back at the caretaker’s cottage I checked the potatoes, thought they looked a little unpleasantly translucent like they do when you try to pan fry them raw, and went back outside. I rearranged the myriad garage objects and tossed several bags of garbage into the back of the truck and then went back inside. I checked the heat on the potatoes, stood staring at Miss December on the Stihl calendar just to the left of the stove top and thought how she didn’t look cold, and went out and started up the truck.
I got that windshield fixed the other day, after a year of driving with spider web diffusion right up in my face. The crack was caused by a hurricane that had land fallen at New Orleans and then traveled 999 miles (first dropping the hurricane tag, then the tropical storm tag, to become simply a storm named Isobel) to reach my trucked parked under an American chestnut tree in Virginia. The sixty mile per hour wind propelled chestnut projectile had caused the spider webbing dead center drivers side and I had momentarily thought it a bad omen but drove cross country to the American ghetto a couple of times over the next year to debunk that myth. And like you think New Orleans is the only place Lagniappe happens the local Rappahannock mechanic also fixed the electric passenger side window without charge or for that matter without telling me he had done it.
I drove over to Rock Mills to the dump, off loaded, and then drove back to the house. I tossed the potatoes a bit and went back outside. I backed the truck halfway into the garage and took off the camper shell, leaned it up in the back corner. Back inside the potatoes were looking a little forgotten so I turned up the heat and gave them a light chopping with the spatula.
I drove into town to check the PO Box but got blocked at the end of the driveway by SF. We got out of our vehicles and shook hands.
“Did your friend get that bush hog blade off?”
“Oh, yes, and she wanted me to tell you thanks a lot for the advice, you know, its good to have somebody who’s done it before…”
“Yeah, of course...did she sharpen it?
“Not yet, and we’re going south in a few days so she probably won’t get to it before we get back.”
“Do you have it here with you?”
“Well, I did yesterday, but I don’t now.”
“If you want, if you leave it up the shed while you’re gone, I could sharpen it for you.”
“That’s a nice offer, I don’t know, she may want to do it herself so she knows how, but maybe you doing it once would give her the look of it and that would be good, so, I’ll ask her.”
“Well yeah, just leave it in the shed back there…”
This went on for a good while. I was starting to worry about those potatoes. Forgive the cliché but real men don’t worry about potatoes. SF told me his son’s girlfriend was having another baby. I know the son. I can mess with him a little. And I can’t resist corn pone humor. I said,
“Well good for them. I’m just wondering though, has Jr. figured out what causes that?”
I caught SF off guard with that one but he chuckled and said he wasn’t sure.
I said, “Well, you send the boy over and let me have a little talk with him, because it looks like maybe you never had that talk with him.”
SF laughed. “I’ll do that. I’ll send him over.”
“Yeah, send him over, I worry about Jr…”
Jesus, what was going to happen to my potatoes? I tried a bit of let’s wrap this up body language. It didn’t work right away but after a few more topic changes we shook hands and I was free to go. I paused, thinking maybe I should back up and check on those potatoes, but…come on, don’t be a sissy. I drove the few blocks into town. The mailbox yielded some insurance papers and a couple of juicy offers to get further into debt.
When I got back inside the bottom layer of potatoes was predictably blackened. Perfect. Mission almost accomplished. I tossed them and cracked a couple of brown eggs into a separate pan, with butter. I grated some cheese. The potatoes, onions, and garlic, had reduced to about a third of their original size. I put them in a bowl and threw on top the cheese. The yolk of a perfect over medium fried egg will run between 3/8th and 5/8th of and inch, on a level surface. I laid my nearly perfect eggs on top of the cheese which was already melted on top of the potatoes, which I forgot to mention, were lightly salted and peppered. Damn, lunchtime already.
In the afternoon, properly fueled, I went to the Co-op, and wanting to go easy on my truck made three separate trips out of loading and unloading 45 bags of shredded pine bark mulch for the bighouse flower garden, and the new (anticipating spring) flower bed I recently dug by my driveway. When I’m tripping, you know, I just mean daydreaming, although truth be told, I do have lucid daydreams, I see flowers spreading like the growing fractures of a cracked windshield, all over this forty acres, with me being the mule.
I miscalculated by a good bit on that mulch. I’ll need 30 more bags to finish out that bighouse bed. It’s a little cold right now, but it should warm up some later in the day…
Parking It
The Shenandoah National Park is open 24 hours so if you go through the booth at the Thornton Gap entrance and the ranger says, after welcoming you--the park is closing at 5 p.m., then you know something is up. It was snowing a little bit so Lorina and I presumed that to be the reason for the early closing. I said, oh we plan on being gone by then, even though 5 p.m. was only two hours away and that really doesn’t amount to much of a hike. We were getting a late start. People do hike at night but usually under full moons any time after the leaves have fallen. Under new moon, early park closing, and snow, it would be considered bad form to be hiking in the evening hours.
Lorina couldn’t think of the trail name until the last minute and then it turned out to be Stony Man. It was Sunday and therefore not as good, generally speaking, as midweek hiking, because during the week you run much less the risk of running into that most dangerous and sometimes frightful park animal, hah, the human being. But this was one of the first days of let’s put on long johns sort of weather and being the second week of December, most people probably are trying to stimulate the US economy with Christmas shopping. We only saw two other cars in the park, none in the Stony Man parking lot.
One of the more interesting bits of trivia regarding the Shenandoah Park is that the range, which goes under different names (Appalachian, etc.) to confuse people, was once, like before man walked the earth, much bigger, sharper, jagged, and taller than it is now and there is suggested the similarity between either the Rockies or the Swiss Alps. For me why this is a particularly gratifying piece of trivia is because the range is considerably less spectacular in the tall jagged sense but so much more pleasing in the round, green with flowing streams and waterfalls sense, even as it provides the ancient evidence of shear granite cliffs (for rock climbers, and geology buffs) of an age which is purported to be some of the oldest on the planet earth. So, what I’m saying is, whatever bit of slow moving apocalypse occurred here, implies a brighter future. I am not here advocating the use of atomic bombs in the Rockies and the Alps, for those who require instant gratification. That would not be a satisfactory shortcut.
We are hiking up the mountain a ways and the cold air hurts the lungs a little but the path is not so steep as to be painfully annoying. It is snowing soft sleet pellets and the trail is lightly dusted white. Lorina shows me the first four story cliff face and I can see how it might be climbable, even for a moderately athletic person, but I don’t even like roller coasters or other similarly safe thrills, so I don’t think I would climb this. I’m not sure I would be able to shake the memory of a casual friend of mine who a few years ago fell four stories during a rock climb. Even though, really, he doesn’t have hardly a glimmer of perceptible limp at this writing. I don’t mind listening to Lorina’s instruction though because people often change their minds and so should I ever find myself three stories up a four story climb, I would like to have as much knowledge about the sport as possible.
We walk on, the trail is pretty much level at this point, and Lorina suggests we turn around because my truck is rear wheel drive and way too light in that rear. The drive down the mountain, with no other traffic to melt the snow, would soon be, or could soon be, treacherous. I agree we should turn around, but let’s walk just a couple hundred yards more. So we do that, and then pause. The snow/sleet is not falling anymore. Lorina nods up the hill and says, wanna hike off trail for awhile? I say yes and she leads the way up and I just follow, in most cases, the same indentations left by her boots in the rich, rocky soil, occasionally having to grab onto a tree trunk or a chunk of granite cropping to pull myself up. After the trail proper has become a memory I ask if she is pretty sure about bisecting the trail again by this off trail methodology. She is sure.
I feel pretty good and it’s not windy and I have a lighter and there is lots of dry wood on the ground. I like it here. I could live here for one night. Probably wouldn’t sleep much and I didn’t bring any snacks and the park ranger would wag her finger at us if she ever got a chance but people get lost, it happens all the time.
We were lost for awhile but as a follower I felt less the mild panic than did Lorina, who had to deal not only with finding the path but with that distraction of emotion related to diminishing certainty. She’d been reading my mind for about a week so instead of talking I just thought, its ok Lorina, we can sleep here, it’s cozy. I’m glad we didn’t have to though. We changed directions once and I thought of that Blair Witch movie, lost in the woods going in circles and all, but in the end there was a white streak ahead of us. Instead of yelling out, there’s the trail, I just kept walking because the streak didn’t look that different from the dusting of snow along a foreground streak caused by snow on a fallen log. Shortly, Lorina said, there it is, and reaching it ahead of me got down on her hands and knees and kissed the sugar coated earth. I said I bet that is only partly in humor and she said goddamn right. Not being lost is only to be properly appreciated after being pretty well lost on a potentially snowy night. Although, back on the trail, the happiness related to comfort and certainty is somewhat tinged by a sense of melancholy which is connected to the memory of that ecstatic freedom of being truly lost and disconnected from all things familiar. I hope to get back out there before driving down to New Orleans on Friday.
The Pink Lee Press On Nail
I’m painting the walls in the basement while these two black guys speaking French are putting together the pool table. We don’t talk to each other that much. Their job requires a certain level of expertise and mine really doesn’t. I could actually talk and still do an adequate job and truly they probably could too but it doesn’t seem like we have that much to say on this particular day. Honestly, I’m not even talking to myself that much. So it’s cool, we’re working peacefully in this room together except there’s really no reason they should have to smell paint fumes in the course of their job. I’ve got a couple of windows open and the outside entrance door too. They don’t complain about the fumes, unless they are doing it in French. I don’t speak French but I used to speak a little Spanish and I’m getting the idea of some their words. When they laugh I don’t assume they are laughing at me, but they could be. I am not without humorous content. It seems more like straight French rather than that totally poetic sounding Creole that the Haitians speak, with whom I am somewhat familiar from my days in New Orleans. I could ask them where they are from, because I am curious, but I am also tired of predictable questions. Hell, maybe they’re from France, or Canada.
One of the guys asks me (in English) at a certain point if he is in my way and I say, no, not at all, I’ve got plenty to do in other parts of the room. It is a large, finished basement, easily bigger than the house I live in. I start picking up the minutiae of five year old boy treasure and transfer it from its chaotic placement around the room, into a short sided cardboard box. Then I move a low, free-standing bookcase or knick knack shelf away from the wall. I throw down a drop cloth. I climb a six foot ladder and paint with a brush where the wall meets the ceiling. It’s called cutting in. Then I climb down and paint with a brush where the wall meets the baseboard. Then I get a roller and dip and roll it around in a five gallon bucket half full of paint, lift it up over the bucket, turn it around a few times by spinning the roller handle, and then put it to the wall and roll until it’s dry. Repeat. I’m working slowly now because I don’t want the pool table guys to think I’m waiting on them. But I am.
There are Ritz cracker crumbs all over the floor but I didn’t do it.
The five year old comes down and wants to help but I tell him he has to change his clothes. He goes up two floors and comes back and I tell him the pants are ok but the shirt is too good, change it. He leaves and comes back later looking as blue collar as he’s gonna get. He’s a barefoot painter like me. I lay down some extra protection against an already painted small section of wall; give him as much instruction as he’s going to take and presto, instant painter. He makes a few mistakes like all the five year olds I’ve employed but his work ethic is solid and he doesn’t talk back. Although, at five, he’s a little too literate for this type of work. He asks at one point—will this paint dry quickly? I want to grab him by the shoulders and say, boy, you can’t use adverbs in this line of work, but I don’t. He wouldn’t get it. It wouldn’t be funny to anyone but I and I don’t even think it’s that funny. After awhile he gets bored and goes back upstairs.
The two men finish the table and the bubble on the torpedo level is true blue so I initial here, here, here, and here, and sign here. As a duly appointed agent of the owner I tip the guys forty bucks and they take off.
I start painting the last long wall, the one closest to the brand new six million dollar pool table. Somebody upstairs, and I’m not going to say who, thinks it would be a good idea to let run free down here with me the five year old, the eight year old and his precocious friend, and the five year olds’ three and a half year old girlfriend. There was in attendance a young, polite, perhaps college freshman, perhaps Yalie, I’m not sure, but he made five people sharing the room with me at the end of a long day. He did reign the kids in sufficient enough for me to feel less the need to duct tape them all in a screaming ball and toss them out into the cold gray drizzle, so his attendance is not to be underestimated.
But before the perhaps college freshman came down the eight year old starts racking them up. Truly as little as possible but sometimes I treat other people’s children as if they were my own, and here let me not be remiss in mentioning that I have no children of my own. I do not in the least little bit pretend that this temporary treatment of other people’s children as my own is a good thing, but to me, watching a child with his full store of post school energy, stuck inside because of the rain, start to do something that to me seems like a bad idea, well, it is just as if I were watching him put his hand in a roaring campfire. And here do not let me pretend that I’m all about the altruism because part of me wants to let him put his hand in the roaring campfire as the quickest path to the hard earned, and therefore well remembered, lesson.
“No, you can’t do that now.”
You know he’s petulant. He says, “why?” with all the grating confidence of five Lee Press On Nails across a chalkboard.
I’m good for one “why?” I explain how it is that I’m painting the wall right by the pool table and how I need to finish (so I can go hide somewhere away from screaming children). By implication of my demeanor I am also saying—I was here first, I am bigger than you, and, I am meaner than you. I am an ogre sure as they are in fairy tales and after I’m done eating you I will use one of your rib bones for a toothpick.
The eight year old backs off a little bit. But is soon to be joined by his precocious friend who is to my present state of mind, for all intents and purposes, a giant Lee Press On Nail. A pink one. The two of them start talking about playing kickball, which is one of the main activities that go on in this room. There was even talk of putting the new six million dollar pool table so close to the wall as to render it useless, just to keep it out of the kickball base path.
“No, you can’t play kickball now.” (Large, freshly painted, still wet wall, and bouncing kickball, and 4’X8’ six million dollar horizontal surface.)
The Pink Lee Press On Nail says—“why?”
(Circuits sizzle, little puffs of smoke are emitting from out of my ears, and nose, and corner of my mouth as it cracks open on one side in grimace. I hear as if from down a long tunnel the words—why don’t you all go play down in the basement.)
Before I even know I’m saying it, I’m saying it. I say—Just because.
If you were ever yourself a petulant kid you know that was one of the things you swore to God you would never say to your own kids, because, it makes no sense. To a kid, anyway.
The Pink Lee Press On Nail says—“that doesn’t make any sense.”
“Yes it does.”
“No, it doesn’t.”
“What you mean is, is that it isn’t a complete sentence, and it’s not, but it does make sense.”
“It doesn’t.”
All these kids, they go to schools that don’t employ the use of heavy wooden paddles with holes drilled in them.
“Look kid, its idiomatic shorthand for—‘you’re about to get my backhand.’ When an adult says to you ‘just because’ you had better believe the words have meaning. In a world where parents have evolved to a point of not smacking their kids anymore the words ‘just because’ could possibly mean that you are about to be made an exception of."
“You ended a sentence with a preposition.”
“So did you.”
Dogs
Dogs are forever showing magical powers so if one looks at you when you are leaving, all uncharacteristically sad like, it makes you wonder if he is forecasting your imminent demise. Doesn’t it? It did me at the time, a few days ago, and then later, which was this morning, it did again as I remembered it after escaping by seconds the high speed rear ending of my truck into the carpet van on 66, returning to the bucolic Rappahannock from the less than bucolic DC area. I had been daydreaming towards the left, amazed by the rush hour into DC, on the other side of the highway, 37 miles out.
I survived it though, and that’s all that matters, end of story.
A couple of days before the dog implied my premature ending I had almost died of fright or had a bad case of shoppingphobia in a Charlottesville, VA. Shopping mall, buying a somewhat sub semi-formal outfit for a semi-formal party, which seems a contradiction of terms (formal party, and for that matter, jimlouis buys outfit), but isn’t, and this the many of you who leave your homes to attend soirées on a regular basis no doubt know. I had tried on the sport coat, semi-formal all the way baby, and elicited a veritable whoosh of you so hot from the attending Lorina, but me and Perry Ellis could not agree on the 300 dollar price tag. If my so-called salesman hadn’t been as hopelessly lanky and unable to find clothes in his own store and also been hands off in his approach I wouldn’t have made it as far as I did. I picked up a cashmere sweater and dropped it like a hot cashmere potato when I saw the 200 dollar price tag. Except for at the Thrift City next to the Rock n’ Bowl in New Orleans, I haven’t done any actual clothes type shopping in, uh, going on thirty years or so, and that would I guess extend into the past beyond New Orleans but I can’t pull up the cities or the names of the thrift stores for you, beyond the obvious, Goodwill and Salvation Army, and Poughkeepsie (which is a joke because you know I never lived, or shopped, in Poughkeepsie.)
I may go into Culpeper and if I see Perry the Hobo I might ask if he’ll sell me his jacket for 25. Other than that though I’ll just go jacketless, and besides, who’s got all this disposable income to be getting caviar and red wine stains out of 300 dollar jackets? I know what you’re thinking. 300 dollars? My socks cost more than that. Right? And, Perry Ellis? Where were you shopping, Walmart? Just leave me alone.
But it was a long day, with more shopping than I mentioned, and, Charlottesville is not just around the corner from here and that was a round trip on a day we also were round tripping to and from DC to hear The Magnetic Fields at the Birchmere (in, actually, Alexandria.) It was crazy in Charlottesville with all the manic Christmas shopper energy and that per-capita higher than normal number of assholes in the Lowe’s parking lot (I was one of them, I admit.) Also in the parking lot Sponge Bob’s best friend, Patrick, was up 4 stories high in one of those bucketed fire rescue cranes and for the life of me I could not think of his name. Lorina wanted to know how, without a TV, I am so up on this Sponge Bob character (“What?!!!!,” I challenged, “you don’t know Sponge Bob?). This was before, after, or in between one of the times I wanted to merck her as a result of me not handling the stress very well. So if I couldn’t remember Patrick’s name then how come I can now you may wonder? I have a five-year-old friend and yesterday I asked him, twice. “Patrick,” he said, each time, with little, or no, incredulity regarding the scope of my ignorance.
But sure, later I got to go drown my manic depression in the dilaudid-esque well of Magnetic Fields. Which probably would have worked fine if not for the giggly group sitting behind us, who made being depressed not at all enjoyable and more like being in the Lowes parking lot all over again. So we got up and stood but the bouncer said we couldn’t stand, had to sit, and if I pointed out the offending parties “he would take care of it.” No thanks, I smirked, and we went to find seats, next to the only (I swear) other group of happy people in the room. I mean, you can’t really begrudge people happiness, but it is a thing, I think, that can be inappropriate to certain times and space. That bouncer would have been better employed in kicking all the happy people out on their asses. Smiling would be allowed but prolonged head-bobbing and quirky happy chatter would get you thrown out. If voted for, I will run. If elected, I will be an asshole.