|
|
|
wee hours at the Watergate
Thursday, January 19 2017
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, New York
My workday ended at 6:00pm, at which point Gretchen's second-annual birthday noodle party began. She'd been hand-making udon noodles, and she also made at least one other noodle dishes. Our friends gradually arrived, bringing bottles of wine and noodle dishes of their own. We'd had a noodle party the night of the election, and there came a certain point in the evening when it felt like perhaps I'd nodded off and had extended nightmare about Trump winning the presidency, and that I was actually still at that election-night party. Jokingly I asked those around me, "we need to check again to see the returns!" I don't think they got it until I explained myself.
Some of the noodle dishes were Asian and some were Italian, and they didn't all go with one another. But I somehow felt compelled to have a sample of each on my plate for fear of insulting someone whose creation I might've left out. I have to say: olives just don't work with ginger. I don't think they ever will.
I was mostly talking with Chris (of Chris & Kirsti) initially, mostly about issues like the futility of keeping mice out of buildings. Later I was talking to Sandor about out first computer experiences. He'd begun the journey with an Apple IIe, though was familiar with other early home computers. He hadn't remembered that it was possible, on a Commodore machine, to list a line and then cursor-up to re-edit it, a feature I found so indispensible that I never developed any interest in other early home computers. I also told Sandor the story of how I programmed my first computer blind (without a monitor) using an attached speaker, since my house lacked a teevee (which I was then saving up money to buy). It kind of blew his mind. I then went upstairs and retrieved my old Mac II si, which I'd installed in a handcarved aluminum 8-inch floppy drive chassis. As I've mentioned before, it consisted of parts pilfered from a UVA computer lab back when I was too poor to buy such things.
I gave a brief tour of the laboratory and then chatted with Sarah the Vegan in the teevee room about my new job. I admitted that I am not as committed to the cause as others who work for The Organization and that, in the Trump age, promoting our cause might not be the best use of activist donations. But I like my work and the people I work with; indeed, as I explained to Sarah, I might not find a more-compatible co-worker demographic outside this particular cause.
Sarah had made Gretchen's birthday cake, which was a Brooklyn Blackout cake similar to the one Gretchen had made for Sarah's birthday. Sarah only brought the components tonight and had to do most of the assembly in our kitchen. [REDACTED]
Noodle party dining & living room. Looks like Ramona is sneaking some Brooklyn Blackout cake.
Noodle party living room.
Noodle party kitchen scene. From left: Nancy, Sarah the Vegan, Alan (of Jeff & Alana).
Gretchen and I had already loaded our car for the road trip to her parents' house, and we left tonight's party while there were still eight or ten people there. Some had said they would clean up afterwards and others had volunteered to sleep over various nights so the critters wouldn't be left alone. This was the first time we'd ever left a party at our own house and gone somewhere else. (Then again, the occasions for doing such a thing are few and far between.)
We started driving at around 10:00pm, which seemed to be an ideal time for avoiding traffic. Not only would there be a convergence in Washington of assholes and douchebags for Donald Trump's inaugural, but there would also be a convergence of opponents of his regime for the protests to be held the next day.
I drove us all the way to the Maryland Welcome Center on I-95, and Gretchen took over from there.
Once we got to the Capital Beltway, we followed instructions provided by Gretchen's father designed to get us around closed streets. Our new destination was Gretchen's parents' new home: the infamous Watergate. After some confusion in the streets of Silver Spring, we found our way first to Bethesda, and then southward on Wisconsin Avenue through treacherous traffic lights we'd been warned about. Evidently the traffic lights have been equipped to robotically issue speeding tickets to those passing underneath too quickly. There were bright flashes (the kind that would accompany the robotic photography of our license plates) on two occasions as we neared lights, though in one of those cases we were moving very slowly, so it's impossible to know what was really happening (though I was alarmed thats Gretchen continued testing the limits of the system despite its all-seeing nature).
At the Watergate, the people monitoring the cameras had been alerted that we would be coming, so we were let into underground parking without argument or even communicating with the people operating the doors. Gretchen's parents had four spaces in a prime location close to both the garage entrance and the elevator. Soon we were in their seventh floor apartment.
We'd expected the new place to be a stuffy, ostentatious place, the kind of apartment where rich people go to die. And there was indeed a marble entranceway, but with all the familiar things from the old place in Silver Spring, it was similar enough to the old place to not seem alien. Adding to the familiarity was the architectural design of the place; both the Watergate and their old house on Edgevale Road had been built within a few years of each other and their interiors had a lot of similarities, particularly the ubiquitous big sliding-glass windows and cheap two-hinged white-painted luan doors. With two floors and over 3000 square feet, the apartment was a big one, yet it was only half the size of the house they'd moved out of. Though we'd arrived a little after 3:30am, we got a tour of the whole place. It had an unusual layout, featuring a main hallway and a parallel hallway, and unlike most of the apartments in the Watergate, it reach completely across the building from the east to the west, with balconies on either end featuring built-in planters (though there are now rules to keep residents from growing any but the smallest of plants). Both the main hallway and stairway were narrow, perhaps because all of the side-rooms were at the ends of their own short hallways, each lined with storage. Some of the complexity of the apartment was the result of its short but storied history. It had once been the residence of Richard Nixon's Attorney General, John Mitchell (and there had even been, during the early 1970s, a protest attempting to enter the building and storm his apartment; over 100 people were arrested). He was, or course, one of the orchestrators of the break-in of the nearby Watergate Office building nearby. Later the apartment had been the residence of Russell Long, the Louisiana Democrat. Long had expanded the apartment into the neighboring one, but then that additional space had been sealed off and sold off as a separate unit and then his widow had fallen into a prolonged senescence in the apartment, attended mostly by a housekeeper living in the tiny fourth bedroom. It was the Long estate that sold the apartment to Gretchen's parents. The reconstructed wall between the two formerly-unified apartments now has an entangled mish-mash of electrical circuits, so it's a good thing that utilities in the Watergate are all free (or, that is, covered by the rather substantial maintenance fees).
Eventually we went off to bed in our own room overlooking Virginia Avenue (there are four bedrooms and five bathrooms in the apartment).
[REDACTED]
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?170119 feedback
previous | next |
