Odds and Ends of the Season

Today's banner is a scan of a painting by Rockwell Kent. It was sent along to me by my nice New York artist friend (see my last post)after I expressed to her my admiration of Rockwell Kent.

By way of a quick follow up on my New York visit, The New York State Museum in Albany is having a fabulous show of Kent's works right now. Kent lived all over the place, including Vermont, but wound up in the Northern Adirondacks at a farm he called "Asgard", after the home of the Norse gods. His widow, apparently, left a treasure trove of his works to the modest state college in Plattsburgh. These have been shunted down to Albany and displayed beautifully at the State Museum (located in the semi infamous government complex known as Rockefeller Plaza). I know no one every goes to Albany unless they have to, but it is one of those places that can reward a person, (especially given that almost everyone must arrive with low expectations). The Museum is just great and - are you sitting down? It is FREE.

The snow here in Vermont is not looking nearly so fresh and bright today as the snow in this painting. Mud season has begun. Our weekly ski trip for tomorrow has been cancelled because it is supposed to rain. I am not so sure that April is the cruellest month... Don't forget to set your clocks ahead an hour tonight!

Finally, here's a great youtube video. I have seen it posted at a bunch of places around the internet (My friend Mrs. Uhdd has it on her beautiful "Up Hill Down Dale" blog - see the sidebar) but if you haven't seen it, you should check it out.

The People Ride Through a Hole in the Ground

Sing it, "New York, New York!"



Phew. Back in Vermont having done our part in NYC over the weekend to spend the country out of this miserable recesssion.

A few vignettes for your consideration:

1. We somehow managed to stumble into the "quiet car," on the Amtrak train from Albany to Penn Station. This is a a form of library on wheels, as the conductor reminded us, particularly us, seeing we were traveling with children, numerous times. The woman seated behind Shackleton and I promptly got out of her seat and moved down the car when she saw us settle in. Thankfully, I had a deck of cards. I whipped Shackleton at blackjack all the day down the Hudson until we got to Sing-Sing. He didn't want to miss the view of the prison (at Ossining, the institution of "up the river" fame).

2. NYC on Friday last was enjoying spring. It was about 56 degrees Farenheit when we arrived. We had left the land of mist and snow and felt like we were in the banana belt. Shirtless joggers, that sort of thing.

Arriving at our hotel via yellow cab, my precious packet of hotel info., tickets etc. were caught in an updraft such as you can only get when opening a cab door on a street with skyscrapers on three sides, and an ocean on the fourth, and a strange temperature gradient. All were carried away. You know that mad scramble moment of getting out of a cab, paying the fare, getting children to sidewalk, getting bags out of trunk without wasting one second of the cabbie's valuable time? (My inner mid-westerner asserts itself at these moments and I am worried about under/over tipping, appearing awkward and like a person who hardly ever rides in New York cabs). Add to that moment a requirement to chase bits of paper into traffic and Welcome to New York! I missed the fact that my return train ticket was one of the things that blew away. This ignorance, as you will learn later, was a kind of mercy.

3. Isn't it fun to go to a hotel? We were staying at the Embassy Suites at rates that I think of as a recession special ($140 a night with the tax!). They let us check in early and we felt like kings in our suite which looked out at NY Harbor. Crane your neck just a little and there was the Statue of Liberty.


The view from the temporary last house

4. Off to the Museum of Natural History uptown. This was my first time back on the NY Subways since M. Giuliani allegedly cleaned them up. Subway man behind bullet-proof glass was periodically intelligible as he leaned into a skinny, stuttering microphone to tell us to go to the machines to buy our tickets. He smiled kindly at Shackleton and did not seem irritated by our ignorance. The Understudy saw a rat run across the track while we waited for the uptown train. She had been saying in the not too distant past that she wanted a rat for a pet. I think we're down with that. Train showed little evidence of the hand of Giuliani.



5. Ahh, Central Park. I had forgotten that New York really has beauty and magic. If I were going to live there, it would have to be someplace around the Park - like, in one of those apartments Woody Allen used to shoot the interiors of Hannah and Her Sisters. I could be happy in that New York. New York as a voyage of self discovery... Now I know I am an uptown girl. Well, former girl - do they have uptown drudges?



6. The kids' favorite part of the museum was not the $20 a ticket planetarium show, or the reconstructed dinosaurs or anything featured in the "Night in the Museum". Predictably, as per our usual museum experience, the gift shop was the main source of fascination. In a "quiet car" karmic moment, there was a little kid seated behind me in my $20 seat (they quake during the cosmic collisions, by the way) who began screaming, "Let's get out of here!" as soon as the dome dimmed... An usher eventually arrived with a flashlight to lead him and his mom away, thank You Know Who.

7. Lovely friend from high school with whom I recently reconnected via facebook got me on my cell phone and hiked some huge distance with her own two-year-old in a stroller to meet us all at the museum. I had given her carte blanche to avoid us; she is a painter who has three little kids and who also had at least three relatives visiting last weekend, but she came anyway. Hello and thanks again T! I loved it that my friend, the Manhattan artist who has run a couple NYC marathons, had given her baby a Homer-Simpson style donut with white icing and sprinkles (not eaten but held with interest) and that she was excited about two months of free HBO. Maybe people in Manhattan aren't so different from you and me...


My friend and her baby showing Shackleton and the Understudy a beauty spot with a view of New York.

8. Dinner at Pizzeria Uno across from the museum, with the rain falling on the big windows and the headlights from the taxis lighting the dusk with the dark trunks of Central Park's trees across the avenue. We were served by a Jamaican waitress called "Pauline." She wrote her name on a napkin for us and put it in the center of the table to get things going. Pauline sounded like she had stepped into Uno from Jamaican Central Casting. With her accent, even "There are no free refills" sounded like a song.



9. Highlights of the next day included FAO Schwarz, the fabulous toy store that sits at the knee of that Grande Dame, the Plaza Hotel.










The people at FAO were really nice, like, Wisconsin nice. Wow. A clerk ran around with the Understudy and her friend giving them ideas for good digital photos. Here's the trio of kids and the nice clerk. The guy watching me snap the picture looks slightly put off by us, doesn't he?



10. Other events of the day included the MOMA Design Store. I had learned my lesson and skipped the museum and went straight to the store. The kids liked it almost as much as FAO. Then lunch and the matinee of Mary Poppins. We were in the nosebleed seats but found much to admire, if not to love, about the play.

11. The next day was Sunday and our last day in New York. The hotel was next door to Ground Zero, so we walked over to pay our respects.


Ground Zero from the porch of St. Paul's Church

12. My big plan for Sunday morning was to visit the Tenement Museum. It is, as the name implies, a museum in a preserved lower-East-Side tenement building. I had read great things about it and decided we would walk around in Chinatown (which has gobbled up most of that section of Manhattan) by way of a cultural experience. By then, however, the wind was blowing very cold. At one point, a small Chinese woman stepped toward me with a paper in her hand and made some request, in Chinese. I don't really look Chinese, so this was curious behavior. Vermont children were complaining of the cold and slightly freaked out by the downtown scene so I finally got a cab. Unfortunately, the cab driver did not know where the museum was and, literally, couldn't find it with a map. We abandoned ship when I determined we were within a block or two (on Delancey Street - as I write I hear Blossom Dearie singing "I'll Take Manhattan": "It's very fancy, on old Delancey Street ya know." That was irony and poetry. It was not ever, and is not now, very fancy on old Delancey Street.)

We found the place just in time to take a tour of two tenements lived in by garment industry workers. I learned a lot - mostly that being a garment worker in NYC around the turn of the century and living in a tenement really sucked. Appalling, unbelievable, third world conditions prevailed. We all know this, of course, but seeing the rooms where these people sewed and lived, if you can call it that, was eye opening. My own grandfather was born to a German immigrant in 1898. My great grandfather, a vain martinet, accordng to family legend, at least had the sense to get the hell out of New York City after he got off the boat. He managed to procure a farm upstate and to marry an American woman. While I am sure that farm life in the Catskills presented its own difficulties, at least the risk of TB was greatly lessened and my grandfather and his brothers and sisters didn't have to share the backyard privy with 20 other families.

13. Back to the hotel and the train station. As we round up the bags, I see I have no train ticket. It must have blown away on Friday! Well, ignorance was bliss. Surely Amtrak will replace it? One need only wait in a long line to get the answer. The answer is, "No." A man with a defeated air and long fingers looked at his computer screen in the dull fluorescent light of Penn Station and informed me, in rather an embarrassed fashion, that "Amtrak policy is to make you buy another ticket if you lose one." Bastards.

14. The train was packed and I irked a guy who was getting ready to sit down by telling him I was planning on sitting in that seat. Sorry! But two days in New York had made me pushy. Also, I was trying to stay near the Understudy, since we couldn't sit together. Good thing too, as a strange man approached her seat a few minutes into the journey and tried to say her seat was his. The woman sitting next to the Understudy said he hadn't been sitting there before we boarded so I told her to stay put. This kind of thing doesn't happen in Vermont...

Glad to have gone. Glad to be home.

Goin' to New York

Me and some of my kinfolk are leaving these hills for a few days and heading down to NYC.

I am little worried that they won't let me onto Manhattan island. Do they still have those style police posted on the bridges and in the tunnels? I was really concerned about that kind of thing during high school and college years growing up as I did in darkest Schenectady. I remember a kid from Long Island paying me the ultimate compliment when I was 20. He found out that I was from upstate: "Really?" he said. "I thought you were from the City." Well, I was trying harder in those years.

Thankfully, it is too cold for the turnip truck so we have bought train tickets. I'll let you know how it goes.

Finish This Sentence: What the World Needs Now Is ...

My usual answer, probably like yours, would be "bleach". Times being what they are, however, I guess I'll change that to "money".



Driving around Stowe the other day in a fog, with the snow tired and dirty, even dangerous, and all the news bad, I hopped out of the van to take these pictures. Not exactly subtle, I know, but something of the zeitgeist presented itself: the normally benign fields and mountains of Vermont transformed into an Orc-blasted landscape. (These are actually color shots...)



It's Sunday, however, just barely, as I am doing some insomniac blogging in the small hours after some time away. I have the headphones on and am listening to Paul Hillier & the Theater of Voices singing Arvo Part's "Summa". I have just heard it three times through. It suffices to remind a person of, well, many things beyond the cares of the day, or even the cares of the times.

I could not find Paul Hillier & Co. on Youtube - I paid my .99 for it at iTunes and it was, of course, well worth it. Here's a string version for your contemplation.

Eject! Eject!

Pimlico Cross Country Trail

Has the snow in England melted yet? I heard an amusing (and sort of amazing) radio report on Thursday morning about how the country had been paralyzed by six inches of snow. Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, was interviewed and was nearly breathless about how "extraordinary" it was. The report made it sound as if a moon-sized meteorite rather than a few inches of snow that had hit London.

You know I love you, all you lovely British people, but this will not do. What happened to "keep calm and carry on"?

Just now, hopping around my favorite blogs, I found this over at Unmitigated England (see the sidebar). If you've been looking for a great blog to read, with pictures just as good, do yourself a favor and click through.

Lights in A Dark Season; Recent Reading, Stowe Skiing, and Shackleton Speaks, Again

During the last few days I have finished Volume 1 of Evelyn Waugh's 1964 Autobiography, A Little Learning, a library sale purchase a few months ago). There is, unfortunately, no volume 2. It died with Waugh two years after Volume 1 was published. Fortunately, this book takes him up through the Oxford years and just beyond so it is full of interest. It's the first thing I have read in ages that I couldn't put down. A few lines that particularly caught my attention.

From the first page:

I longed for the loan of the Time Machine - a contraption with its saddle and quartz bars that was plainly a glorification of the bicycle. What a waste of that magical vehicle to take it prying into the future, as had the hero of the book! The future, dreariest of prospects! Were I in the saddle I should set the engine Slow Astern. To hover gently back through the centuries (not more than 30 of them) would be the most exquisite pleasure of which I can conceive. Even in my own brief life I feel the need of some such device as a failing memory alienates me daily further from my origins and experience.

I liked his description of his mother as well, particularly this:

She would have preferred to live in the country and from her I learned that towns are places of exile where the unfortunate are driven to congregate in order to earn their livings in an unhealthy and unnatural way.

I also listened to Cormac McCarthy's The Road on CD last week.
It might seem like the only two things these books have in common is that they are written in English (and that I recently consumed them). The other thing is that they were written by actual geniuses who write like angels - one a very dark angel, however. The Road is the story of a father and son travelling along an unnamed highway in a post-apocalyptic America, on their way to anywhere. It was actually agony to listen to this story for protracted periods. I persisted because I had been pulled in and, thank God, the absolute worst does not happen - well, at least in terms of the father and son. The depravity of the few other survivors in this ashen future is unbounded, and so heinous that it would have been unimaginable - if Cormac McCarty had not come along and imagined it and made a person realize, "Yes, that is how it would be."

I am not surprised the book won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2006, or that it has been made into a movie. I am surprised Oprah picked it out for her book club (!) and that McCarthy was interviewed by Oprah on her show (!!!) How'd I miss that? It's like the Queen swinging by Patty's Snack Bar here in le Vermont Profond for a clam roll.

So, there you have it. Thumbs up from your hostess on both of those.

Skiing

(This is not my picture. It's better than any picture I could take. I didn't have my camera along on this weekend's ski trip, and it was cloudy on Sunday while we were there. This is a picture of Stowe appearing on the Boston Globe website).

Waaay back in my early posts I talked a bit about how I learned to ski, sort of, at least, in my late 30s. I had never skied as a kid and only got started when it became apparent I would have to learn or the Understudy and Shackleton would have no one to ski with but instructors (As they were born in Vermont and live 9 miles from Jay Peak skiing was just a given). I couldn't afford all those lessons, so I bought skis and got going.

I was not destined to be a great skier or even a good one, but I progressed to the point where I could get down the hill without killing myself or anyone else - if it is not too terribly steep and not too crowded. For some reason that I can't now remember we did not ski last year. I think it was because the kids got ice skates and skating was cheaper and easier than skiing so we skipped a year. I think now that was a mistake.

God in his mercy has created many ski hills in Vermont and also executives at some of those mountains who let school kids come and ski with volunteer instructors at hugely reduced rates. Stowe, where I went for the first time this year, has such a program (thank you Stowe) and Shackleton and the Understudy were back there this weekend for another lesson. During their previous lessons this season I have enjoyed sitting in the Lodge drinking coffee, but this last Sunday, for the first time in two years I bought a half-day lift ticket ($65 - ouch!), put on my skis on and had a go.

I hate to be crass (although I can get over it) but I have decided that skiing actually is better than sex. I want to ski ALL THE TIME. Skiing is life. It is like flying. Even a terrible skier like me, who has to ski with three-year-olds and people who normally live near the Equator, can love skiing. I love skiing. I want MOOORE.

Also, I am completely smitten with Stowe. It is sort of stylish in Vermont for natives to talk trash about Stowe (a place fit only for New Yorkers and celebrities) but it is splendid and beautiful. If only it had cheaper tickets...

Shackletonisms



On the way to the mountain, we stopped at a local McDonald's for fuel. We have been there many times, but since our last visit they have changed the counter, adding a downmarket McStarbucks, oops, "McCafe". It wasn't operating yet, but it changed the look of the place. Shackleton was pondering the change and said,

"There's something different about this place, but I can't put my tongue on it."

This reminded me to share a few of his other gems that I have been meaning to post. Here ya go:

1. In the car, driving home in the dark with a crescent moon hanging in a cloudless sky:

"There's an old, old tale that I just made up."

2. Trying to choose a DVD to watch one night, I said, foolishly, that we all had to agree. The Understudy proposed several choices. Each time, Shackleton said, "I don't agree." The Understudy, exasperated, said, at last, "You don't agree on anything!" Shackleton said, "I don't agree with that either."

3. Whusband trying to get Shackleton to try some new food:

"Do you want to try this?"

Shackleton. "No way, Jose. No way. No way. Oh, and what was I going to say? Oh yeah, NO WAY!"

As Jack Handy once said on Saturday Night Live: "The face of a child can say so much, especially the mouth part of the face."

I, And 345 Or So Others, Are Escaped to Tell You.

The old life odometer tipped over to "44" this last weekend. How'd that happen? The big day got started at the auction where I bought some chipped Haviland china ($5 -for 4 dessert plates and a sugar bowl) and a great little collection of Jackie-Kennedy-Era hats in period hatbox from Bambergers Department Store ($22.50).

The box is black and decorated with little gold Fleurs de Lis. The lid is black and white stripes with "Bambergers" written in jaunty gold script. My long association with Quebec, and strange royalist tendencies, pull me toward anything decorated with Fleurs de Lis. I think the hats will look smashing on the Understudy. I forced her to model the best one just now by threatening to give Shackleton the entirety of the last Fruit Roll-Up unless she went up and got that hat and put - it - on! The crappy picture was predictable. We'll have to do better on some later occasion. Still, you get a notion of how fabulous this hat is and of the wonders of the hatbox from whence it emerged.



After the auction it was off to Stowe for the kids' ski lesson. There were ice sculptures everywhere. Fabulous. Cold and windy, but fabulous. Whusband made a pie. I bought myself flowers at Price Chopper left over from Chinese New Year. They are still on the table. My sister and nieces sent me a card that arrived on Saturday with a $50 Target gift card.

So, I am not complaining. How could I? Well, there is the fact that I have the sense that I am falling apart like a cheap suit these days. Mortality! The Center Cannot hold, and all that. But then I got to thinking...

This birthday coincided roughly with my receipt of a book put together by some stalwarts from my high school class on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of our graduation from High School. I didn't go to the reunion, which took place last summer, but I bought the book.

Does anything make more fascinating reading than the bios, 25 years on, of the people with whom you went to high school? And are any illustrations more interesting than the pictures of the same? I sent in a little self-serving item like around 20 percent of our class, which consisted of about 350 people.

We were each of us reared in a prosperous suburb of Schenectady, New York. Schenectady was, and is, a high tech kind of place, at least vestigially, because of the presence of GE. It's R&D center was located in our "town" (no town center, really, to speak of, mostly housing developments within striking distance of the lab).

Our High School was a bragging point for most of the adults in our lives. People moved to our town to send their kids to this great school. I didn't believe this propaganda then, but I guess I do now. Lots of bios seem to mention "Yale" and similar institutions. Funny, people I assumed were miserable in High School seem to be largely responsible for all this rounding up of and organizing of the alumni. Could it be that I still don't know everything?

Most of those who provided recent pictures, or who allowed photographs to be taken at the reunion, have held up pretty well. Some look astonishingly good - better than they did at 18. I am not in that group. Others look, well, like strange old people. I am closer to this group. Then there is a third group, memorialized on a single page, who are dead. Whew. That's what had me thinking along the lines of Job, from whose book I have paraphrased today's post title.

There are five altogether out of our class of 350 (or so) who didn't make it into their early 40s. One - and I remember this well - didn't even make it to the high school. She died in 7th grade in a car crash. She was too cool to be my friend but she had come to my birthday party in 6th grade. Her name is etched in memory. I had heard about two others who were dead before we got out of college. Two others are on that page whom I don't much remember and whose fates were unknown to me until I got the book.

In the last year or so my sister dredged a bunch of our high school stuff out of the house in which we used to live. It included a picture of me being handed my high school diploma by the assistant principal, Mr. Carangelo, on the stage at Proctor's Theatre in Schenectady. I am grinning like an embarrassed idiot. It looks like my mortar board is a heartbeat from slipping off my head. I am wearing the gown in a shade of red no longer available in the United States and made of a petroleum based product, as I recall. I don't remember much about the ceremony, although I do remember sitting with all 350-whatever of us in the dark: jocks, nerds, drama fags (sorry but that was the affectionate sobriquet) we didn't have goths yet, all in alphabetical order, ready to be loosed on our lives and the world.

Pondering this I was glad that the Grim Reaper wasn't actually visible up on stage with Mr. Carangelo, letting us know the odds. Two of you will not make it out of your 20s, 2 more will not see 40. What news next? Always the same, I suppose. But in the meantime, there are adorable models for vintage hats,
and the hats and their boxes,
and skiing, and ice sculptures,
and discount Chinese New Year flowers ,
and apple pies,
and Target, and gift cards to Target!

And for that, and so many other things, let those of us who have escaped to tell be grateful.

Mom-ook of the Morth

Did you hear about the weather up here today? My kind neighbor drove my kids to school (the snow didn't come til around brunch time so school wasn't cancelled). I used an hour or two of the morning for a slow hike, befitting my semi-collapsed state - in my beloved woods at Jay Peak.

In all this snow, a creek rock becomes muffin-like, with strata of different snow falls clearly visible.



And here's the Family Conveyance, as it appeared today after my trip up Jay Peak then to the Pick & Shovel and RJ's Friendly Market in Newport.



I actually love all this snow.