Close: NaBlurBloPa

Well. That approximate month of blog entries was the end of me not posting things to Exurbitude. Which is not to say that I've started writing here again -- just that I've stopped not writing here.

That said, I think "Exurbitude," as a concept, is over, given that it's been nearly ten years since we moved from New York, and more than five since I stopped working there. So the title only works on one level now; a journal of life in an exurb. Which, come on, without the dramatic motion of tearing oneself away from the city, is sort of, you know, like Newheart. Funny show, don't get me wrong. Less than instructive, though. One level? Too few by half.

THAT said, tonight I bought jeans that taper all the way down, which, as I understand it, is less a convention of farming and more one of the alleys and barrooms of the metropolis. So maybe my heart, or my ankles, or my pantsal region, still resides in Hell's Kitchen or Forest Hills or the Upper East Side, or wherever pants like that still count. (Possibly only here, from where I write -- a northern suburb of Baltimore. I haven't seen anyone else in these jeans today, though. I'll check tomorrow when we swing through Pennsylvania Dutch country, past the Shoe House, or at the Christkindlmarkt on our way home.)

I'm working on another experimental writing project, but am glad to've broken the seal on this blog. What have you been up to? Comments welcome.

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Update: Nothing Has Changed

Fiveish years ago I wrote about a couple of developments underway in the woodlands surrounding my town. Neither has been built yet; one is still under way and the other is held up in various zoning wrangles. Thankfully. It takes sixty years to grow the woods, and just a month to cut them down—so it's probably worth an extra year or two to be sure you want to do that, before you do that.

In any case, someone stopped by where I was sitting today and asked if I had an opinion on that one, the tied up one, and I said oh sure, and I said, actually, here.


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Don't Sweat the Small Stuff that Dreams Are Made Of

Not far from my house is a coffee shop. Once a month, I host a karaoke night there. In exchange the owners give me tokens for free coffee, plus beers during the evening itself. My "hosting" duties include kicking things off with peculiar renditions of popular songs, and making puns between numbers by other singers.

If you're a married man in his 40s with kids, hosting karaoke in your neighborhood is among the most fun things you can do on a Saturday night. That sentence wants to sound pathetic, but it just can't. It's funner than movies. It's funner than bars. It's funner than the opera. It might not be funner than going to see live music by a great band, but it's closer and, instead of costing a boatload of money for a sitter and transportation and tickets and a kid-sized plastic cup of warm ginger ale with a splash of Old Grandad in, it pays you beer and coffee.

And it's good to hold the mic.

Small entertainments pack as much emotional grandeur as the big things; on some Saturdays you just need enough to cement social ties, put a pleasant tune in your head, give you a chuckle, let you show off a little, picture your life a little bigger. It doesn't all have to be big. It doesn't have to be grand. Where I live there are landscapes and monumental sculpture and the river to deliver grandeur — and not too far away is the glow of the city, to which we've been known to repair for big kicks. But most Saturdays, I only need so much. And the backyard delivers.

Tonight a guy asked to sing this song a capella. Nailed it.

Superstar.


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Moving the Goats

The bait: BBQ at our friends' house. The switch: "Can you help us move the goats?"

I've mentioned these friends before. They live in a large house a couple of towns away, the sort of voluminous newly-built home on a grand scale that has frequently been the subject of derision in this space, but which in their hands feels truly homey. Although the woman of the house calls it the "Plastic Palace," it's been the site of some lovely small gatherings and warm conversation. And they have a freezer full of venison donated by their oil guy. And hell, the man of the house is a Brit, the good kind--he even gets to wear a funny wig and a black robe, like, officially--and they have a kid named after a working man's folk hero, while the lady of the house is worldly and writes for a travel blog and if these two want a McMansion well then let 'em have it.

Another thing you can't argue with is the way they engage with the large meadow that surrounds it. They borrowed goats from a farm up the road.

As we drove up the long dirt driveway across this long expanse of meadow, we noticed that the portable paddock had been moved around to one of the overgrown areas in front of the house. No camera, of course, but the juxtaposition of the two goats (one black, one white), the chest-high weeds, the thick metal tubing of the fence, and the stately home with its Palladian windows and stone facing was quite something.

We entered and had our white wine, natch, and chatted about this and that, and admired the rosemary-covered chickens roasting on the rotisserie on the deck, then our friend casually said that the farmer had called and asked them to rotate the livestock. In other words, pick up the paddock sections and move them to an uneaten portion of the meadow and get the goats back inside.

Naturally the males of the group -- the risk management consultant, the marketing professional, the architect, the college student -- began ritual primate displays and paraded outside (after another fortifying Sauvignon Blanc) to show these beasts who was boss.

It took a humbling half hour, not so much to move the fence sections, but to persuade Mushroom, the more capricious of the two goats, to get back into the pen once we'd moved it. Lured by white bread, the much more tame Seven had wandered in directly. No, the funny bit was each of us trying in turn to get Mushroom's attention or herd Mushroom or persuade Mushroom to go to her home. Things goats don't respond to: clicking sounds, claps, whistles, kissing noises, their name, injunctions to "come on" delivered while slapping both thighs and bending forward. Walking toward a recalcitrant goat may cause a rearing, snorting, and suggestive horn-flinging in the direction of the walker, who, if he is a white-collar professional wearing a polo shirt, will step back in some confusion and utter a single "I say!"

We finally hit on the plan of opening the section of the pen nearest Mushroom really wide, and she walked in.

That morning at the organic farm I'd been talking to one of the local agitators, a man who refurbishes old houses and turns them into sustainable businesses, who railed against one village's unwillingness to envision a future that didn't depend entirely on oil; a self-sufficient future, with local jobs, local food sources, local culture, local commerce. We talked up over and around it for a while then said seeya, and later that evening I found myself moving a goat pen in front of a McMansion with my educated, citified, worldly friends before stepping inside to a delicious dinner and highbrow conversation.

If we're lucky and we plan right, moving the goats is the future. I certainly hope it -- or something like it -- is in my future. Because many of the alternatives are a lot worse.



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Chips off the old block

My wife and I were driving a babysitter home not long after we'd moved up to this town from the other town to the south, and as we passed the country club where I'd married a beautiful, intelligent, progressive and funny woman one time, I saw a white-spotted pink boulder nestled in a stone wall.

"Rebecca," I said to the babysitter. "Do you know what kind of rock that is?"

Rebecca did not. Not because she wasn't smart, but because there was really no reason for a 16-year-old girl to know anything about Schunnemunk conglomerate, not unless she wore thick braids and coke-bottle glasses and played English horn and collected bugs, and these things Rebecca did not do.

Nevertheless, for a couple of minutes — as long as I harangued her about the distinctive rock, which is found nowhere else in the region and appears only in smaller patches in northern New Jersey — she was edified on the subject. Schunnemunk conglomerate. Doubtless she forced the mineral out of her mind as quickly as possible upon arriving home (home, which was back in the town we'd lived in earlier; this was before we'd integrated into our new digs, when the people of our new town still called us city folk and threw kittens into our well) by listening to that M&M and that Molly Cyprus woman or watching Dancing with the Chef.

This is what it looks like, and this is where it comes from.








Schunnemunk is a long narrow ridge, recently named a state park, that is ribboned with trails and rattlesnakes. That scene in Michael Clayton, when Clooney runs away from the burning car? He runs up the northern terminus of the Jessup Trail, which continues for about ten miles along the ridge. Also up there are the Dark Hollow, the Sweet Clover, the Long Path, and the trail up High Knob. At the high points where the soil doesn't cling, this peculiar pink stone larded with quartz shows itself between the pine scrub. It's a tacky-colored puddingstone, mauve, from the late Devonian, when such things were in fashion.

Here's where a better or worse writer might go for the metaphor. Certainly the territory is rich: remember, we're driving past the site of our wedding, the stones of this mountain are made up of these tiny quartz moments embedded in sandstone, and the whole ridge — a 3,000-foot thick cap of conglomerate atop earlier Devonian deposits — is highly durable and resistant to the elements. People have used the stone for centuries around these parts, and it has made its way from town to town. There's a millstone made from it beside a pond in Monroe; chunks of the rock are mixed in with the local gneiss in the stone planters outside the Town Hall in Highland Mills; Central Valley's got it in spades. Like the bits of quartz in their sandy matrix, pieces of Schunnemunk are embedded in the lives of the people who live in this region.

A better or worse writer might say that it is like my wife and me, this slightly tacky but useful stone, comprising sand and fire, part of the earth of these valleys; sometimes slightly invisible to the residents, but slowly incorporating into the local fabric.

But what a better or worse writer might not realize is that there's no excuse for boring a high school junior with her whole life ahead of her so badly that her eyes wander to the distant horizon, over the ridge she doesn't even see anymore, to dream of a place — far, far away from this town and the aging nerd in the front seat, babbling about rocks — from which she will never want to return.



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Updates

Few things:
  • I saw an eagle standing on the ice out on Tomahawk Lake this morning.
  • My patellar tendo(i?)nitis is much more localized than it was, but returns after each long run.
  • We dropped in on friends and found three goats penned in their backyard. I was not upset that they hadn't told us about the goats; I was upset that they weren't reading Exurbitude, because if they had, they would have told us about the goats. (The goats were on loan to eat weeds.)
  • THE GIANTS WIN THE PENNANT, THE GIANTS WIN THE PENNANT, THE GIANTS WIN THE PENNANT
Actual prose to follow.

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She'll Need to Buy Some Doats, Though

There's a kid in my town who wants a goat (Capra aegagrus hircus). (A kid who wants a goat -- you see how that works? Comedy, that's how. Anyway.) There's a prohibition on livestock in the village, but she's petitioned the board and they've patted her on the head and commended her enthusiasm and so far said no. But in their relative wisdom, they've asked her to return with more research on the impact of goats on neighbors (as she reported in her initial letter to the village board, a goat is fairly quiet, emitting only the occasional "maa") and have floated the idea of licensing goats in the village--which I for one think is a capital idea. Despite the possibility of attracting coyotes and bears and wolverines and chupacabras.

I've wanted a goat for centuries, of course, and planned to get one as soon as I could ditch the job and build a fence. (Oh, I've got the fence in mind, and it is a doozy, let me tell you. I would be proud of that fence. Not like the last one. Nosir.) And then, I guess, sell pictures of the goat on eBay for a living.

Goats eat poison ivy. That there is enough reason, I think, to have one.

Anyway, the family? Of the kid who wants the goat? We're the rubes who bought their scrappy little floodable house when we moved to town. Day One, I thought -- but didn't tell the openminded but practical woman who bought it with me -- oh, right by the shed is a perfect spot for a goat pen. A house like this attracts that kind, I guess. And that's all right with me.

All you goatherds--can you help this young girl get her goat? What can a goat's neighbors expect? Besides the dread undead vampiric beasts that will come to feed on its "maa"-emitting corpse? The comments await.

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Ding-a-Clang-a-Lang-Ling Ding

It's possible we had the only cowbell in the neighborhood, growing up, but I wouldn't swear to it. This was a brown old thing, copper or brass, I suppose, that had the look of actually having been worn by a cow. Perhaps a cow in Queens, from whence my People came to this tree-lined swath of suburbia.

There were five of us kids, and at dusk (if we were lucky, and she was home from work), Mom would lean out the door and shake the thing vigorously. Its clapper would sound the country call. Chowtime! Grub's rustled! Come n' git it! There's nothing quite like a cowbell in the hands of a cook. Certainly not on a cow, where it has an almost elegant restraint, a single melodic donk every once in a while. Or in a country-rock song, where it introduces itself most bodaciously to set a certain formal tone and then departs until the next break. No, a cook has a deadline and needs to communicate urgency over distance. Git it while it's hot! I don't care where y'are, get on home! This thing would pop and clang and hit wooden notes and create a sort of Appalachian jazz chaos. You could hear it a good way off. And not just you. But your neighbors. Your friends. Your enemies. The ones who Wouldn't Understand.

I don't know if we were the only family with a cowbell, but I do know that we were the only ones to get summoned for supper by one, like ranch hands or farm laborers, maybe loggers up in a forested camp. Play would cease (although to be honest, we ate later than everyone else, so we might have been loitering out there kicking a ball around just waiting for the bell) and we would rush back to the house from five different points, salivary glands firing madly, Pavlovian cues as deep-seated as those instilled in any laboratory.

So we were mildly embarrassed by the cowbell, but it meant something else, as well. It was Mom calling us home to get some good food and to bask in the family. It was kind of like the opening bell in a boxing match, too; five kids don't switch from running around outside to sitting down to table without punching one another a few times. I know it's seared into my memory, and I'm sure it is for the other four. One lasting effect, interestingly, is that I get hungry during marathons and at your more commercial country shows.

I like to think now that the other kids envied us. THEIR Moms would lean out, sure, but they'd just yell in Brooklynese for "all a yiz" to "get in heeh."

We had a BELL.


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Jiggety Jig

My earliest semi-adult trips away from home without my folks were two-night overnight camping trips in scouts. I have very specific memories of riding back into town in some other kid's dad's car and seeing the movie theater and the Amoco station and wondering how they could possibly still look the same, after I'd been away.

Driving back into that same town after a couple of months away this past weekend, it's flipped: I feel exactly the same, and the Amoco station is a KFC and the theater is a row of doctors' and accountants' offices. And I stick around for a couple of days, then leave town, and see that the bookstore is a dance studio and the Gap is a toy store. How does a farm become a Gap and then become a toy store all within my own memory?

I'd like to report that driving back into THIS town after the weekend away I couldn't believe everything had remained the same, except that while we were gone someone opened a sushi place and they hung a help wanted sign on the new burger joint and all the rest of the leaves fell and the whole place is covered in yellow maple and rainwater, and sometimes the new town, more than a year old, still doesn't quite feel like home.


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I Guess I Planted

Saturday morning we leapt from bed, jammed everyone into their fleecy clothes, gobbled down a quick cup of coffee and some oatmeal on our way out the door wandered around the house for a while like a herd of sleep-deprived goats, looking for shoes and rejecting all breakfast ideas, before finally getting into the car and driving to a tree-planting organized by the Hudson River Estuary Program's Trees for Tribs initiative. The idea is to create erosion and runoff buffers around Hudson tributaries by planting trees, and to then eat pizza.

We got out of the car and shoved the stroller (the town stroller, not the woodland stroller, whoops) through waist-high grass down toward the bank of the Moodna Creek, ignoring the plaintive bleats of our son, who hated his coat, and his shoes, and his too-large work gloves, and us, and who was cold. It was simple enough to follow the rows of plastic tubing that had been erected to protect the newly-planted saplings from browsing deer, until we found the other hippies concerned citizens who had decided this was important enough to do on a Saturday morning.

Although we had been alerted to the event by an email from a friend in another town who couldn't actually make it to plant trees, we found ourselves in the midst of a who's-who: the woman we bought our house from, a friend we made through other friends, one of our babysitters, the water authority consultant I'd already talked to about our cellar...it seemed as though we'd found the right crowd.

The work was very light (somehow the holes had dug themselves) and our companions had done much of it already. Almost before the lad had asked if we were ready to leave, we were ready to leave. Just then, atop the mighty iron Moodna Viaduct, something like 200 feet overhead, a Secaucus-bound New Jersey Transit train hove into view. That did it for the boy, and the look on his face did it for us.

While we had worked, shoving dirt in around the root balls of the thin sticks and staking up tubes of corrugated plastic to protect them from nibbling teeth, I had tried to impress the boy with the seriousness of what we were doing, tried to get him to picture a time twenty years hence when a proud stand of oaks and maples that he had helped plant would keep the creek within its banks and help the adjacent fields retain their topsoil, while providing habitat for animals and shade for hikers— and what he'll remember is the train.

Which is also fine by me.


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Archaeologize at Home! Ask Me How!

We've got a glass farm going next to the house. Requires no sunlight or water—basically all you have to do is throw a bunch of broken glass on the ground and kick some dirt over it, then die, then in 80 years someone else buys the house and keeps noticing all this glass glinting through the soil in the patch of woods back behind the shed. Actually, it doesn't sound fun to start such a farm—because of the having to die part—but we, the beneficiaries of our predecessor's foresight, started the glass harvest this past weekend.



And what a trove of jagged crap we've discovered! A few minutes' work with a pick and a hoe yields not just glass, but an enchanting array of flaking and rusty bits of metal, a spoon, wire, a fragmented leather(n) child's shoe, pot handles, a ribeye bone, plus the fragments of bottles and crockery, some bearing decorations and some plain. Like us, the previous homesteaders enjoyed both the milk and the whiskey, plus other unknown sasparillas, lemon cokes, Efficacious Solutions, laudanum, & c. They apparently ate from plates. There are some of what appear to be horseless carriage parts -- at least, they're completely rust-bloated, larger and heavier than any normal household metal object we use today. Although I suppose they could be parts of dismantled stoves or other appliances.

I'm clinging to the thought that this was an appropriate site for the disposal of household waste in the early part of the 20th century. Before a couple of additions onto the house in the last twenty years or so, this spot was even more distant from the actual building, and I'm assuming—persuading myself, really—that it wasn't a filthy, lazy and vile habit to throw your crap in a disorganized heap in an unused part of your own property instead of carting it to a communal dump someplace. I'm telling myself that this stuff is old because I'd much prefer it to have happened when it seems it would have been more appropriate, and so far the lack of tupperware, Alberto V05 cans, 8-track cassettes or frilly velour tuxedos mixed into the junk supports my wishful thinking.



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The Meeting I Made

Truly friends, have things changed. Among the many ills brought about by commuting is the fragmentation of communities that disproportionately depend on long commutes for their economy. Where I live, where the average commute runs someplace in the 90-minute range (which usually means New York City), there's really no way that anyone wants to come home after such a slog and figure out how to attend the library board meeting, the school night, the church concert, etc. As County Planning Commissioner David Church put it:
"People just can't make the commitment," says Church, who notes that many towns — and his department — schedule meetings later and later, hoping for better attendance. All that time commuting is a big reason why volunteer fire departments and ambulance corps from Blooming Grove to Bloomingburg are hurting for members. "Communities lack the connectedness. It's less of a democracy."


That was my lot for the last four years. Last month, I changed jobs, and changed commutes....

And this evening, at a very civilized 7:30, my wife and I sat down in the Hamptonburgh Town Hall to hear the Orange County Water Authority's presentation on the regional impacts of climate change. The keynote speaker was Dr. Patrick Kinney of Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, who summarized a recent report on climate change projections for the northeast. The host was Simon Gruber, head of the Water Authority and on every local green's rolodex. And I had the pleasure of saying hello to Mr. Church, who continually advocates for smart development in the county.

It was precisely the meeting I wanted to attend, to feel like part of the space up here, to listen to people who knew something about the air I breathe and the water I drink and who understand how to keep those things working properly. But it was time that allowed it.


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How It Went Down (A Father's Perspective)

The parents of a very pregnant woman who lived with me last year had come to visit so as to be on hand for the birth of their third grandchild (sorry I keep pausing, although you can't tell, but I'm eating some fried chicken while I'm writing this and it's hard to get the best fried gristle bits out of the ribcage without using both hands and then wiping down so's not to spoil the pretty Mac keyboard, anyhoo). That was a Thursday evening, I guess, and Friday morning my mother-in-law woke up with a numb leg. We took her over to the hospital down the street (the hospital where my wife was born, incidentally, but which no longer has a birthing center) and they looked her over for a day or two, ruling some things out, but leaving plenty of options on the table.

So it was Wednesday the following week, a year ago today as it happens, and the plan today was to get Mom down to Columbia Presbyterian in New York City, or maybe she was already there? I don't remember, but anyway, my wife was planning to go down there and visit her, with the boy and the belly. We had a backup plan for watching the boy when we had to go to the hospital, which was my sister would come up from the city when we called.

In any case, it was Wednesday and I was down at work, and my wife had gone and bought a cell phone for herself, and she and the boy and the belly were about to mosey on down to the city, and if I don't get some dialogue in here this post is going to fall asleep. So she called me at some point.

"I feel weird," she said.

"Having-a-baby weird or uncomfortable-in-these-clothes weird?"

"Eventually having-a-baby weird, but not yet. More like, some contractions, but pretty much like Braxton-Hicks ones, but something's definitely in the works. I mean, I lost my mucous plug. But it's definitely not soon."

"Today?"

"Maybe, but not anytime soon. I guess it can't hurt for me to go down to the hospital to visit, right? I mean, at least I'll be at a hospital," she said.

And down they went, and around 1:00 she called and said something like "Hmm. Maybe it would be easier if instead of taking the train home, you just caught a cab up here and drove us home."

"Are you having a baby? Should we stay at Columbia?"

"Oh, heavens no," she said. "Let's just go home. After all, Our Friend Who Is A Nurse is bringing over that really good pasta and chicken dish."

"True dat," I replied, or words to that effect. I called my sister at her office.

"How'd you like to come to Columbia Presbyterian Hospital?"

"Uhhh, sure, I guess. Any particular reason?"

"I think it's today, and That Pregnant Woman Who Lives With Me is there and I figure I'll drive her and the boy home. But don't worry, a nurse is bringing us dinner at home tonight."

"Uhh. Okay."

Two cabs later we were having a nice chat with my Mother in Law (ideopathic transverse myelitis! go figure) and wrapping up the visit and heading home. It was all very relaxing and nice. We got home. Our Friend Who Is A Nurse came over a little while later. She and my sister busied themselves making the chicken and pasta. We made sure we had a bag packed. We hung around.

"How's it going?"

"Oh, you know, little contraction every once in a while," she said.

"Sure," I said. I'm smooth like that. "Little contraction. Roger."

So we sit down to this meal and let me tell you, Our Friend Who Is A Nurse is not just a nurse, she can cook like the dickens (she's also a star athelete and a potter and a baker extraordinaire and you don't want to get into a garden contest with her and she's on the library board a couple of towns over from here and I don't know how she does it but anyway) so we tucked in to that chicken and pasta.

That increasingly pregnant but-about-not-to-be woman came in from the salon with a fluffy bathtowel and sat on it and served herself seconds and said something like "we got water," and then something like "this pasta and chicken is delicious."

At this point, we all stared at her. "Just what the hell is going on here?" I asked.

"Huh?" she said, mouth full of food. "Nothing, I'm just really hungry." She put down her fork. "Think I should call the doctor?"

She called the office and they paged the goofball on duty and he said something like "sure yeah right whatever are you in any pain how far apart are the contractions, you say your water just broke, call me when it hurts" or whatever.

"Hey," I said. "Where IS the hospital anyway?" I pushed my plate away and wiped my hands on a napkin (actually I just did that now because of the chicken, but it's atmospheric, no?). "Do we have a map?" I asked my sister.

She stared at me. No help at all.

My wife was back on the phone with the doctor. "Well, it'll take us a little while to get there," she said. "Oh yeah? Sure, I'll hold."

"Hey, honey," I said. "It ought to take us about forty minutes, I guess. How're you doing?"

She was having cute little contractions, but didn't seem to mind. They still had her on hold.

Then I heard her do a little inadvertant Lamaze breath, and I thought something like holy shit — this feels just like denial! Just then Our Friend Who Is A Nurse walked over and murmured something like "think maybe it's time you guys hit the road?" I nodded.

That's when it sped up. I grabbed the phone out of my wife's hand, she started doing a LOT of Lamaze breathing, we ran outside and bundled her into the car, friend, sister and boy in tow and screeched out of the driveway. The boy yelled from the porch in a sudden panic "WHAT TIME SHOULD I GO TO BED!?"

"8!" We didn't even have time to spell out the word, is how fast we were going!

My car is a, how you say, heap, and I pushed it to 85 the entire way, and sure enough it was a 40-minute drive and we had entertaining conversation as it became apparent that things were Much Further Along than we'd thought. Chat like:

"Don't push!" and

"I'm going to have this fucking baby in the car!"

I got the doctor on the phone -- I was remarkably calm, I thought, driving 85 in a stick on a dark highway with one hand, doing Lamaze coaching out of one side of my mouth, talking to a lackadaisickal doctor on a cell phone out the other. I asked if he thought they ought to alert an ambulance corps on the way, or maybe the police. Calm radiated outward from the phone. He wasn't concerned. Everything was going to be okay, except that I was going to smash the phone hard enough to make his head hurt because dammit, my wife said she's going to HAVE THE BABY NOW and WE'RE NOT AMATEURS, we're DONE THIS BEFORE, she was CONSCIOUS THEN and SHE REMEMBERS WHAT IT'S LIKE.

I'd bought that car on eBay, as previously mentioned, for $2,500. Goooooood car. We pulled into the emergency entrance — practically INTO the emergency entrance — and I hopped out and ran around to get my wife out. Some dude did one of those Hollywood "hey, you can't park he—" deals as I ran inside calling for a wheelchair.

They tried to hand me paperwork while I wheeled my wife along a corridor asking where the maternity ward and Doctor McChill were located and while my wife did the end-stage no-pushing breathing. I tried to explain that I wasn't a panicky first-time dad convinced the baby was coming when it wasn't, but was in fact a panicky second-time dad who had some idea that they were about to have a messy desk area, and that we weren't going to flee without doing paperwork.

We entered the birthing room with nurses in tow. Despite about an hour's warning, they hadn't set anything up yet. Doctor Cool ambled in, chuckling, and had my wife lie down.

"Well now, let's just take a look and see what all the fu---ck!" he said, or something like that. "Okay, don't push!" A stream of commands and the rapid setup of ping-machines followed, my wife pushed for a few minutes and presto.

A girl. Happy birthday, Little.




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Bursting in Air

Last night, alerted between downpours by thunderous warning shots from the pending fireworks display on the town land next door, the boy and I trudged through the woods -- down a freshly weed-whacked path through poison ivy and other nefarious plants -- to the field behind the library from which much water flows.

~~~~
Flashback to February 2006; an observant woman who lives with me is taking a walk around this house, looking at the roof from the yard. "What's that six-foot scorch mark?" she asks the realtor showing the place. There is an ugly black scar spanning eight or ten rows of shingle.

"Hoooo-eeee, they don't make chimneys like that anymore," says the woman, pointing at another house.

"No, no, THAT scorchmark," says my wife, pointing to the scorch mark on this house.

"And it's a whole third of an acre," explains the realtor. "Plenty of room to expand."

"Hey, is that from the fireworks you guys told us are so close?" I venture.

"Shall we look at the cellar?" she asks. "They've just put in a fabulous Be-Dri™ system down there. Bone. Dry."
~~~~

So we get out there, in the rain, and the fireworks start. Like small-town fireworks everywhere they're half-baked, going off occasionally, sometimes in sequence, sometimes not high enough. A bunch of us crowd under the overhang on the public library to evade both the rain and the falling ash. A couple of big ones explode about thirty feet up. The pall of smoke sometimes fogs our view, but the smell of the gunpowder is nice.

They do two finales, but we've already started back before we realize there's a final barrage. I'm stepping through dense undergrowth cautiously, my comrade ahead of me with the light. Vivid flashes, accompanied by ear-shattering crashes, slam into us and light our way. The boy, wearing earplugs, seems more or less unfazed, or perhaps numbed. The breeze kicks up at our back, and the shadows of trees stand out stark, like tall strangers in the mist around us, and still this last volley continues, BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG, each percussion picking out every stem of oily weed and jagged thorn as we hasten through the undergrowth back to the house.

In the morning there are busted pieces of rocket, shreds of paper, wisps of fuse and string, all of it smoky, scorched, blackened. On the cars, on the lawn, hanging in the trees. There are only a couple of pieces on the roof, which was fortunately well soaked by the rain.



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The Wheels (of Justice)

It's December 2006, and I get a speeding ticket. I plead not guilty, because I am clear in my conscience. This evening, my court date. My name is called in the small, packed room. I walk the four feet from the back of the room to stand before the judge, who doesn't look up but takes out a rubber stamp, whacks it on a piece of paper and says "go home."

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Introducing: Storm King Adventure Tours

Not far from where I live, a new business opened up this spring. As of last night, they've got a website. Welcome SKAT. Do you like kayaking? Do you like Hudson River Valley Kayaking Tours? Do you like Hudson River Valley Hiking and Mountain Biking Adventure Tours? Do you like how subtly I'm putting keywords about kayak tours and kayaking and hiking and mountain biking into this post and linking it to Storm King Adventure Tours? Do you think I'm some kind of traffic pimp? Well.

Storm King Adventure Tours, the Orange County New York mid-Hudson region's best outdoor adventure tour outfitter, is a really cool place if you like the outdoors. There's lots of open space in this area, and they capitalize on it. Check 'em out if you get up this way. And yes, yes, please tell them I sent you.

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FEMAlicious

We had some small amount of damage from the floods back in April: cracks in the cellar floor, possible rust to the undercarriage on the furnace and water heater, some loss to the pointing in the foundation, significant erosion in the backyard that’ll make future water even more problematic if not addressed.

Yesterday, the gummint came over to (possibly) help. A neighbor told us that the Fedrul Emergency “Heckuvajob” Management Agency (FEHMA) has been doling out funds to flood victims in our area, even those with comparatively modest needs, like us. I hadn’t considered us eligible: sure, if we wanted to fix this stuff we’d have to pay, but maybe we could just LALALALA ignore it and it would fix itself?

Apparently Warshington takes a different view. I verbally filled out an application for assistance via the toll-free number, including such odd details as the baby’s social security number – as if the feds don’t already know that – and next day a G-woman came to the house for a look-see. She said we’d be hearing from them soon.

The telemarketing calls started the day I gave all that info over the phone. Last night they continued: caller ID tells us that something called Equity Freedom is trying to call us from Long Island, but hangs up when we answer. Another number, pegged to someone called Oliver, has tossed a couple of hang-ups our way, as well. And last night my opinion on adolescent health was sought desperately by a shifty-sounding outfit who claimed to be taking surveys. We’re on that Do Not Call list, but something seems to have jammed the gears slightly. Either someone got hacked, or Uncle Spam is selling our info to offset costs. Or it’s a coincidence.

Will I take FEHMA’s dirty, dirty money? You bet. I’m happy to have my taxes help my neighbors out of a flood-related jam, so I’m willing to accept the same in proportion to my need. But can I have mine on the telephony-free plan?

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On Getting a Contractor

So your daughter is getting old enough to crawl and you don’t have a) spindles on your staircase or b) skills or c) time to develop (b) so you can install (a). You want: a handyman. Simple. The process works like this:

1) Identify a need: Spindles, banister
2) Look in phonebook (because you’re old-fashioned and the Internet just doesn’t work for this kind of thing) under “construction.” Find lots of people.
3) Call three of them. Get firm commitments for them to come out and give you an estimate.
4) On the appointed day, wait.
5) Repeat Step 4.
6) Repeat Step 2.
7) Repeat Step 3, choosing three different contractors.
8) Repeat Step 4.
9) As you begin to repeat Step 2, get a call from the first of the second batch of contractors. Make a firm commitment for him to come right over.
10) Repeat Step 4.
11) Repeat Step 1: Baby helmet, knee & elbow pads, gym mats.

This process works for all kind of skilled people. Say you want an engineer to come assess your drainage and foundation needs. You can do the exact same thing. Say you need a painter. A landscaper. A babysitter. Anyone, really. This exercise really builds your appointment-making abilities. What it does not build is your house.

Somewhere these guys are working up a really great condo complex or something, and they’re consulting on foundations and watching each others’ kids and putting mulch around the yew trees and building staircases and kitchen cabinets up and down the hillsides while the radiant-heated tile floors glow in the setting sun and the newly-hung light fixtures glint off the pristine birchwood banisters and spindles on the baby-safe staircases that lead ever upward to brand-new, tastefully colored rooms where people sleep adrift on seas of pleasant dreams.


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