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saved by a thunderstorm
Saturday, June 16 2007
Our friend J from High Falls called asking if we wanted to picnic with him and his boyfriend B at Onteora Lake. Sure, that sounded like fun, so Gretchen prepared a lunch of banana bread and vegan meatloaf sandwiches (vegan meatloaf is much better than its dreary non-vegan namesake). We left Eleanor (still recuperating from her knee surgery) at "Aunt" Andrea's house and drove out to Onteora, finding it jam-packed with, well, a fairly ordinary collection of Americans and all their picnicky Americana. From a distance each was an impressionistic pair of white or pastel paint strokes, one for the billowing tee shirt and another underneath (and of a different color) representing all that is rump. We eventually found a picnic spot near the north end of the lake, though all the actual shoreline spots had been taken. Happily, there were few mosquitos, though there were a number of biting Deer Flies, though they mostly attacked Sally.
When J&B arrived with their contingent (straight from some sort of informal dog show allowing mutts like J&B's Scout), they had five other people with them, suddenly rendering our simple picnic a logistical nightmare. These were various neighbors from High Falls and others from the dog show, most of them looking and acting like the Americans one meets overseas, the kind who stay in better hotels and sail through the Galapagos on better boats than yours. One of them had a smallish collie-style dog that she'd obviously bought from a breeder, which marked the whole lot of them suspect.
For the most part they were too old and frail to hike the quarter mile to the picnic site Gretchen and I had staked out, so it came as a relief when a large group of Big Brothers/Big Sisters vacated a picnic table on the lake's shoreline. I found I couldn't sit with the others because of the huge mess of egg salad that lay like a pig trough between them. Happily, the unpleasant picnic was cut short by a menacing thunderstorm that came from nowhere like the grace of God.
On the way home Gretchen and I went to the liquor store at the Hurley Ridge shopping center to get replenishments for our depleted wine store and liquor cabinet. We ended up spending nearly two hundred dollars.
More Clarence & Eleanor cuteness. They really like each other and they really like that chair!
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