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mouth patch
Wednesday, December 12 2007
Today I took taking advantage of my post-deadline lull to run various errands. Such errands always eventually see me eating slices of pizza at one of the various pizza places I patronize. Today it was at Terra Nova, that pizza joint on 9W in that ugly shopping center near Burlington Coat Factory. A pizza joint is both dismal and egalitarian at the same time. There's nothing glamorous about stopping for a slice, but it's nothing to be ashamed of either. It's a lonely experience eating pizza by yourself, but something about a pizza joint makes it acceptable in a way that other forms of solo restaurant dining never quite are. And you certainly don't have to feel embarrassed if your three year old starts screaming. There was a screamer in Terra Nova today, and by that I do not mean someone who makes a lot of noise while enjoying sexual intercourse.
Meanwhile, adding to the middle class misery of the place, Christmas music had replaced the usual mix of Elvis, Sinatra, and Tom Jones. It was a selection performed in the croony style of the music favored by the restaurant, and I found myself taking careful note of the slight melodic games being played by a male-female duo of singers as they sang the seemingly never-ending "Twelve Days of Christmas." When she sang the "me" in "My true love gave to me," the female vocalist would make it into two notes that she would slide between. The male vocalist also made his "me" into two notes, but without the slide and I found this much less elegant.
Later I picked up some
quarter-inch polyethylene hose, which I later cut into short lengths and used as carbon dioxide ducts running from my gallons of fermenting apple cider into a glass of water so as to allow gas to escape without letting oxygen in.
Gretchen and I had dinner at New World Home Cooking near Woodstock with our friends Dennis and Laura. The food was mediocre but the conversation was fun. Dennis, who is actually our dentist, was telling us about all the people he sees who think it's normal not to have any of their own teeth after age forty. Laura, who is receiving treatment for an eye problem, had been wearing an eye patch to several social events, leading some to wonder if perhaps it was actually a fashion statement. This led me to propose a new kind of orifice patch, one that (were it to catch on) might put Dennis out of business: the mouth patch.
Later we drove to Bearsville to deliver a birthday cake to our friend Susan (the one who wrote a best seller about her relationship with a horse). Susan's husband is in the hospital with a serious lung infection, but here in their house not even our lungs were safe. The carbon monoxide alarm went off while we were there and it took us a good five minutes of trying random rituals before it finally switched off. I think my opening the door to the dangerously-unventilated boiler room is what caused the alarm to fall silent.
Before we left, Susan gave us firewood that had been going to waste.
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