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Chandler and Harrison
Sunday, February 19 2006
With the exception of Gretchen, all the ladies in the house went skiing today, leaving Gretchen with five dogs and us three gentlemen (me, Ray, and Adam). But this afternoon us three guys went bowling in Kingston at the Hoe Bowl. Bowling is a gratuitously red-state activity, and as if to rub it in the woman whom we paid for our rental shoes was wearing a "United We Stand" teeshirt. I've seen that sanctimoniously meaningless expression in a lot of places but I'd never seen it on a teeshirt before.
We ended up playing three games, one of which I managed to rack up a triple digit score in. To our right was game of seven bowlers, all of whom communicated with each other in Spanish. Their scores ranged from the forties into the seventies, indicating that bowling was a fairly new pastime for all of them. To our left was a family consisting of a prematurely middle-aged father and two sons, ranging in age from something light seven to ten. As always with kids this age, bumpers had been placed in the alley gutters so as to make gutter balls an impossibility. Interestingly, the father was playing noticeably worse than his sons under these conditions. He had keyed his name into the scoreboard simply as "Dad" but more telling were the names of his sons, Chandler and Harrison. What kind of signal are you trying to send when you find yourself giving both of your kids last names as first names, and unnecessarily faddish ones at that?
On the way home we stopped at a discount place to buy cheap knives (and, for me, a power drill). Them, closer to home, we stopped for beer, french fries, and chicken wings at the Hurley Mountain Inn, which (being something of a sportsbar) had NASCAR on the teevee. It didn't take long before we were rewarded for our watching with a mild accident.
The big news in Ray's life is that he was recently diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, the kind that can strike anyone at any time. He first noticed symptoms a little over a year ago, around the time when I started noticing he was in the midst of a precipitous episode of weight loss. With the all-knowing power of Google, Ray is as familiar with his condition as any doctor, and he can talk at length about what happens in your body when your cells don't respond to insulin, or when your pancreas, exasperated with unresponsive cells, stops making insulin. How does one even know when one has diabetes? It all comes down to test results for blood sugar. The normal person has a blood sugar level of 900mg/L. Ray's has been has high as 5000 mg/L. He now carries a test kit with him so he can monitor what his levels are. Though it's obvious that the diabetes thing is new and ominous for Ray, he still feels comfortable joking about it, repeatedly sampling something he'd heard said by a wizened old diabetic sage about "the sweet blood." Adding to the humor, I suggested that, in the absence of test equipment, a good way to determine whether or not one has diabetes is to leave a drop of blood on a rock outside and come back later to see if a line of ants has formed.
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