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chili for the hungry man
Wednesday, August 20 2025
On the drive to work this morning, I passed a herd of deer on the side of Hurley Mountain Road a little east of its intersection with Van Wagenen Lane and noticed a mother with two large fawns, probably the same mother with two fawns I'd seen some weeks ago along Bogart Lane roughly 4000 feet to the south. I got a good look at the mother's face this time and she looked like she might be an older deer. And, judging by her behavior and how she looked at me, she seemed to know about cars and the need to keep her fawns out of the road, though of course they didn't seem to be as concerned.
When I got home from work this afternoon, it was too rainy to walk the dogs. Gretchen had taken my visiting brother Don to Woodstock with her again, and this time he'd been more restless than he had been on Monday, repeatedly returning to the bookstore in a way she found relentless and exhausting. I fully expected him to be this way during his visit, and it's a reason to live far away from him (though he manages to carry out some of this behavior remotely with his phone).
The rainy weather and Don's bottomless appetite suggested tonight's meal: a massive pot of chili. (I'd stopped briefly at MyTown Market on the drive home to get things for it.) I made the chili in my usual way, this time with fried onions, tempeh, and mushrooms. But I added an unusual diversity of canned and even non-canned vegetables, including green beans, yellow corn, and pickled jalapeños and the carrots that had been pickled along with them. In addition to all that, I cut up a half cauliflower and threw that into the mix.
When Gretchen returned from Woodstock with Don, it was clear she had had enough of my brother for two or three lifetimes. It's not just that he's special needs, it's also that every detail about his personality and what he wants to talk about annoys her. Compounding matters, his skills at reading a room are those of a profoundly autistic person. When Gretchen sat at her computer to do whatever and he started jabbering at her, she said, "I can't talk now, Don!" This time he actually seemed hurt, saying, "Well, I'm going down to my room!"
As had been the pattern yesterday evening, Gretchen and I ate our dinner upstairs in front of the television while Don wolfed down his food alone at the dinner table. Periodically I'd go down to put more stuff on his plate. He hadn't eaten anything all day and was famished, though it was very good that we weren't there to see him eat. There's something inherently distressing about not just the way he eats but the amounts. It reads as a kind of animal gluttony, one that humans are supposed to have transcended. Somehow he managed to eat about half that enormous pot of chili, along with rice, romaine lettuce, red onions, and chopped up pieces of a tomato that is somehow still green when it is ripe. By the end there, though, he was clearly uncomfortable due to how much he had eaten.
In an effort to find something for Don to do in our house that would allow Gretchen to watch her shows in peace and let me take a nice hot bath, I loaded a movie Don has been pestering me about (Her; he seems to think it's a viable model for one day finding romance) on an old laptop and took it down to Don's room so he could watch it. But Don found the audio from the speakers of the EliteBook 2760p unsatisfactory, and I didn't want to sacrifice a pair of earbuds by having Don stuff them inside his ear holes.
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