|
|
|
finiteness of life
Sunday, April 5 2009
setting: Cacapon Resort State Park, south of Berkeley Springs, West Virginia
Being of different temperament than me, my cabinmates were up with the roosters. At his girlfriend's urging, Azer banged on my door a little before ten to wake me up. Supposedly we were supposed to check out by ten, another thing I didn't know. So I scraped myself together, aided in no small part by my decision to stick mostly to vodka as my alcohol of choice last night. Anything else results in hangovers, and though I'd drunk a range of things, mine wasn't bad.
We all said goodbye to each other as if we were never going to see one another again. And after I dropped my key off at the Old Lodge it certainly felt like the day was over. Being in that cabin kept me isolated from the whims and fancies of my actual friends, and I felt isolated in the Mountain State. So I drove by myself into the heart of old Berkeley Springs, wandering around the sleepy Sunday streets until I found a coffee shop that was open. It was a hip place complete with a barrista with an obviously artifical hair color. As I was about to order, there they were: Azer and his girlfriend. So I sat with them and they told me about a big brunch that was being held for wedding attendees at a nearby hotel. Not having received any of the wedding paperwork, this was news to me. So after sitting and chatting for a bit, we headed over, walking past the old baths on the edge of an approximation of a village green (to the extent such things exist outside of New England).
The brunch was in the Country Inn and featured a lavish dining room attended by exceptionally attentive waitstaff. Never have coffee refills come so quickly, and dirty plates evaporated like spilled moonshine. Nobody I really knew was yet at the brunch, though eventually Shonin's mother and the Goya people sat at the table with Azer, Azer's girlfriend, and me. Azer was telling us about how he occasionally fools people into thinking he comes from a desperately primitive part of the world, where there are no restaurants and people burn gypsies for entertainment, which is an easy trick to play on people if you (like Azer) have a convincing foreign accent. I termed this, "pulling a Borat." With my vaguely Upper Midwestern-by-way-of-northern-Appalachia accent, I'm no good at pulling such a trick, though I have a few other tricks I like to play, particularly when I feel the need to jam someone's culture. Take, for example, when Ms. Goya started talking about how much she loves Cracker Barrel. (I don't know much about Cracker Barrel except that my father's half brother dragged him to one once and he hated it and that it is more ubiquitous than Wal-Mart — something that can't be good.) I piped up that I like it too but I could never find the place. As Ms. Goya began patiently explaining how ubiquitous these interstate eateries and knick knack shops are, I shut her down perhaps a little too quickly with an, "I'm just kidding."
At some point my old Charlottesville friends were finally up and came over, taking their own table. Leah was at that table and motioned me over (Azer was otherwise occupied). So I came over and Aaron and Leah joked again how I'd been sitting at "the loser table." "They're nice people," I countered, taking a seat. I looked over at Nemo's plate and saw that he was eating nothing but bacon.
I don't really remember what we talked about. Wacky Jen and some others had gone off on some sort of hike and gradually the others began leaving the brunch. Some waved goodbye and others got hugs. Eventually it was just me, Aaron, and Jessika standing behind her now somewhat dented PT Cruiser, which was full of crap. And then it was just me walking back to my car a block away.
My hangover had started to kick in as I drove south from Berkeley Springs, past the Rite Aid and the dollar store. Being mostly rooted in vodka, it wasn't a painful hangover. It was more psychological. I found myself experiencing a deep feeling of tragedy at the passage of all that time since I'd last seen most of these people. Where had those years all gone, and is life really so short that you can lose touch with people only to come back and find they've aged? I've only recently found myself bumping up against the stark finiteness of life, and this was another poignant demonstration of it. I also found myself thinking about the tragedy of decisionmaking. We all make decisions and move on, but seeing these people again reminded me of the future I could have had but from which my decisions had cut me off. It's not that I would have been happier in such a future, it's just that it could have been, and now it's dead, and I'm in this future instead. Another of life's limitations, the kind that you just can't say you've experienced when you're twenty or even thirty.
Berkeley Springs is only about 100 miles from Staunton, so it seemed prudent to visit my folks. My father hasn't been doing well lately and it seemed like a good idea to visit him. And I also wanted to set up my brother with his own computer; I'd built him a basic Windows XP machine and had taken ownership of one of the old 17 inch CRT monitors from Eastern Correctional Facility (otherwise destined for a landfill).
When I arrived at the house, my father was sitting in his favorite chair, covered with a blanket. He was briefly unresponsive, but upon realizing it was me he rose to his feet and gave me what passes for a hug in our family. His problems these days are anxiety attacks, and he's been prescribed Celexa to combat them. They sap his initiative and cause him to languish in his chair for most of the day, watching teevee. He's mentally sharp but incapable of getting much pleasure from life.
At the doublewide trailer across Stingy Hollow Road, I set up my psychologically-complicated brother Don with the computer. All he wanted to do with it was use it to "play" a computer CD that had come with an expensive ant book he'd bought called Pheidole in the New World. For some reason I thought this was going to require audio capabilities, but there were no extra speakers to be found anywhere, despite the fact that nothing that enters the property is ever thrown away. I did find some headphones, but they required a bulky adapter that provided dangerous leverage to the audio jack and was best avoided (particularly given my brother's propensity to suddenly leap up and stomp off, his hand held with palms pointed towards each other out in front of his belly and beads of sweat forming on his brow as he mutters to himself about how various familiar dictators would deal with the situation).
I made dinner for everyone in the doublewide's kitchen. It was centered around a pot of various beans (which couldn't be salted or sharply flavored due to my mother's blood pressure issues and sensitive New England palate). I thought corn chips or taco shells would be good to have with the beans, but neither seemed to exist in either house. Eventually, though, Hoagie (my mother) managed to find me a couple boxes of taco shells. They smelled kind of moldy, in the way that the house itself (the old house, not the doublewide) smells moldy. But perhaps they could be restored to edibility if toasted in the oven. I toasted them until they were as light brown. This made them suitable for eating and I for one ate a good number of them. Only later did I look at the box they'd been in and saw that the expiration date had been in early 2006. At least it hadn't been in the 1980s.
Everyone enjoyed the meal, particularly Don (who said it was like a really good Mexican meal at a restaurant) and my father, to whom it had finally given a little much-needed pleasure. He also had a beer with his meal, a little eight ounce Heineken. Hoagie and I both had Red Stripes, a Jamaican beer I had been hoping to introduce to my father.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?090405 feedback
previous | next |
