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cabin north of Phoenicia
Monday, August 2 2021
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I knew I had a dental appointment for early August but had forgotten when it was. The woman from the dental office called late this morning to say that this appointment was actually today, and asked if I could still make it. I was "working" from home at the time, so there was no reason I couldn't. I drove over with the dogs, parked in the shade (where temperatures were perfect for dogs in a car) and then had the initial work done for the installation of a crown on the craggy remains of my top right wisdom tooth. It had a metal post sticking out of it from a root canal, and it had bent at some point. It snapped off when the dentist tried to straighten it, which, he said, was fine. Within only about ten minutes, he managed to grind it down to a shape that could best hold a crown. He also shaved a point off the bottom-right wisdom tooth to deal with some sort of topographic paradox. Next he used a 3D scanner to make the data set that will produce the crown (which is how it's done these days). Finally, he installed a crude little temporary crown that felt to my tongue as though it had been made of sandpaper. The permanent crown installation (as well as a separate procedure for my punk rock incisor) will require a separate visit, but I paid for it all today using just the funds that my employer had paid into my health savings account (this was possible due to a generous "good ole boy" discount, as my father would've called it).
Meanwhile, Gretchen's childhood friend Dina and some of Dina's family are still in the area, but they had to move to another AirBnB after her week-long tenancy in one near New Paltz came to an end. The new one was in Lanesville, a tiny hamlet northeast of Phoenicia, and tonight would be their last night there. So I agreed to come with Gretchen to have dinner over there tonight, since it would be my only time in a very long time to see her (since she currently lives in Tel Aviv). To limit Gretchen's driving, I agreed to meet her at the intersection of Routes 28 and 375 and leave the Subaru there (she was comning from the bookstore).
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Gretchen was feeling so emotionally beaten up that she wanted to go drink some sort of shandy at Woodstock Brewing, the microbrew out there somewhere before Phoenicia. But that place was closed, so we went into Phoenicia instead and got a basket of fries and two non-alcoholic beverages at Sportsman's Alamo Cantina (the combo pizza/Mexican place). After last night's alcohol misadventure, it seemed best for me to avoid all alcohol. We sat in the outside dining area, watching a hovering sparrow hunting for spiders under the eaves. The fries were really good, but my seltzer was luke warm.
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At the cabin rented by Dina's family, we found her there with her mother, father, and 11-year-old son L (her daughter and husband were elsewhere, perhaps Toronto). They were cutting zucchini, one of the many vegetables Gretchen dislikes (though not as much as eggplant or avocado) and Dina's father was trying to figure out how to fold out the seemingly-expandable table. (We ended up giving up on that and eating on a picnic table outside despite the unseasonable coldness coupled somehow with mosquitoes.) L showed Gretchen and me the loft area, where the beds were, and I marveled at a roof window mechanism that behaved like a stiff bicycle chain.
I hadn't spent time with L in years, and it turns out he's really funny. It comes off as extreme maturity, because he's so small that he looks like he might be about eight. When he heard that the kosher red sauce was called "vodka sauce," he affected a Russian accent and said it was so strong it would turn St. Petersburg "back into Lenigrad." And when I mentioned Tesla, he started rapidly listing its good attributes, interjecting "hashtag save-the-turtles!" after mentioning something supposedly good for the environment. It seemed like these were bits and pieces of a routine he'd been developing.
As for the food, it wasn't all that great, partly because Dina's father cannot eat salt or protein because of some sort of kidney condition. There was pasta, green beans, not-very-good vodka sauce, chick peas, and, for some reason, Indian curry.
Later I figured out how the flu worked and successfully made a fire that didn't fill the cabin with smoke and gave L a place to roast marshmallows. I've never seen a kid eat so fast and so much, though I was probably that way at his age. As for me, I think the french fries ruined my appetite, and neither Gretchen nor I participated in eating vegan icecream.
We talked a lot about coronavirus and the crazy people who won't get vaccinated. But just as we were leaving, someone asked me about my mother, so I detailed the whole Sara L. Kesterson scandal. She's the woman, as you may have forgotten, who "borrowed" over $100,000 from my mother, who in return received only thousands of IOUs.
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http://asecular.com/blog.php?210802 feedback
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