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veggie burgers in Scranton
Friday, November 9 2007
setting: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, New York
Gretchen has some first cousins from California, one of whom is attending the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. This cousin had been shacked up with one of Gretchen's brother's friends, but now, to the relief of everyone, they're finally engaged. In celebration, Gretchen's brother would be throwing them an engagement party this weekend at his place, a party both families had been invited to attend. This would also provide an opportunity for Gretchen's brother to show off his second offspring, in this case a ten month old daughter. All of this is my way of explaining why it was that Gretchen and I found ourselves driving the length of Pennsylvania today. As usual, the weather was poor and we even encountered a little snow in the high parts of the Appalachians.
For lunch we stopped at a Petro truckstop in Scranton and ate at its restaurant, The Iron Skillet. Their vegetarian "Garden Burgers" were delicious, as were their french fries. It's not often that I find myself in parts of America where one can smoke cigarettes in public places, and seeing the ashtrays and smelling the stale secondhand smoke was a little like visiting the 1980s. The men's room featured quart-sized stainless steel ash trays bolted to the wall between each urinal. Interestingly, the Iron Skillet featured a segregated area reserved only for "professional drivers." I don't know what the advantage to sitting there could be; perhaps there's a robotic handjob giver rolling around unseen beneath the seats.
For most of the drive we listened to a book-on-disk by Louis Sachar called Small Steps. Sachar is the writer of the teen-oriented book Holes (from which the movie of the same name was made). Small Steps was perfect for this sort of trip, as it wasn't overly complicated and didn't expect me to remember too many names. I found, by the way, that I'd tune out the reading whenever I was negotiating complex lane changes or taking highway exits. Evidently the part of the brain that handles verbal processing (or perhaps the visualization of verbal data) is needed for such tasks.
After about seven and a half hours of roadtrip, we were at Gretchen's brother's place, with Gretchen's mother, father, brother, sister-in-law, one niece, and one nephew. We're not into children, so we experience the lives of kids in well-spaced snapshots, which make for some jerky mental movies. Ten months out from her birth, this was our first snapshot of our new niece, who is in the midst of a pleasant Buddha-like phase. Our nephew, on the other hand, is approaching four and going through a contrarian attention-demanding phase. Suffice it to say this is not a phase one learns much about from the relentless pro-reproduction propaganda of our society.
We spent the night on the couch in the living room, whose decorations consisted almost entirely of pictures of family. On one wall is a sort of shrine to three generations of heterosexual marriage, featuring a framed ketubah and photos of freshly-married couples, all of them looking very similar across a large fraction of the age of photography. This display, whose goal was to joyously connect with a long and sacred tradition, managed to fire the "is that all there is?" neurons deep within my neural cortex. After all, to display nearly-identical snapshots of the same instant of the same endless cycle is to showcase the meaninglessness of life, no matter how joyous the moments depicted.
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