We might have left earlier and made the evening reception, but I needed my head shrunken first, so we set out a little after six. I had not been over Independence Pass since 1998 or so. It's still gorgeous and hairy and windy and loopy and absent guardrails. The Arkansas River looks tempting and there might be stretches where bodily contact with the water, rather than wading overalls and boots, or boats only, is permitted.
In Shrink's waiting room I wrote in my paper journal: I didn't think about this until I chose my next book. I only thought that I had already started it, a few pages at least, and that it's a reasonable vacation book. But I first read Tracey Chevalier in October 2001, the last time we went to Aspen, the weekend we started bombing Afghanistan. Now I am going back to Aspen with my last unread Chevalier, The Virgin Blue, and we are still at war, and Afghanistan is still in rubble.
I still love Aspen. I know our habits there are unsustainable--but I love it. Sunday on the way home, RDC suggested stopping in Vail for a late lunch, and maybe Beaver Creek for coffee, for a trifecta of towns we're only kidding ourselves about. I don't know Beaver Creek at all, but I don't know if I'll ever get over my feeling that Vail got rolled out like so much Play-Do and baked like polymer clay. Or puffy paint, while Aspen feels like a town where people live. And where they can't afford to live, and where they don't actually live, but which is a damn sight prettier than Vail would be even if it didn't have I-70 slap through the middle of it.
Anyway. As soon as we were down out of the Pass, I could smell the black willow cottonwood trees I so love. It makes me want to run alongside a fence. (I am not really allowed to make Sound and Fury jokes.) That's the predominant smell. Also aspen, also ponderosa pine. But mostly this specific species of cottonwood.
Three blocks away from our hotel (the Hotel Aspen), we ate a late dinner at the Hotel Jerome bar. In addition to the Texans whose volume and hairspray and assumptions about go-cups gave them away, and the upper crust so crusty and inbred that the men actually have evolved to grow less body hair on their chests where their knotted sweater arms hang and their faces betray what Toulouse-Lautrec's body did, there were the Aspen crew that I knew, the privileged poor who ski by day, wait tables by night, and manage to prolong their early 20s lifestyle into their 30s.
Besides black willow cottonwoods and people who ski without health insurance, I love Aspen for the stars. Okay, I could get them anywhere outside of a city, but they just add to Aspen's loveliness. And we had a 270-degree view from our patio.
Another plus to our hotel was its proximity to the Main Street Bakery & Café. Not that anything public is too far to walk, but only two blocks is a fine thing. On our entering, CoolBoss waved, and we joined eight or so Dot Orgeristas for breakfast. I am not so good with work folk outside of a work setting, because in my head at least I am demure at work, not laughing The Laugh or swearing or telling raucous jokes or telling stories nine tangents long or at least doing these things only to well-broken-in coworkers and no more than two or three at once. RDC is much better at that, so breakfast was not merely stupid small- or work-talk.
Most people were getting a late start as well because of the reception the night before. We could have done something outdoorsy if we had finished our breakfasts before noon, but no. My sister had told me that one of her friends--happily, RDC's and my mutual favorite from her 18 months here--now owned a jewelry store, named This. I looked This up in the phone book, where it wasn't; I called her and she told me its name under the former owners had been This but its friend-name, well, she couldn't remember That. So I strolled into a jewelry store and said I was looking for one that had used to be called This but its new owners, Friend and Wife, had changed its name? This was Aspen, so of course those jewelers knew the new name. We went into New Name, where Friend wasn't. He was at his fly-fishing store--he had been a guide when we first met him. And there he was, glad to see us, inquiring after my sister, admiring our sleuthing.
Oh, and my earlier epiphany. I had this one, recently, while reading Ulysses, but upon stopping into the bakery where an earlier one bloomed (I slay me), though this time for lemonade, I had to mention it.
We were visiting my sister for the first time upon moving to Colorado. We went into the bakery, where CLH and RDC each ordered a chocolate chip cookie and I a brownie sundae--which they didn't offer on the menu, but I asked if they would just shove a brownie (which they had) into the bottom of a bowl of ice cream (they offered both paper bowls and ice cream) and charge me whatever à la carte and I would just call it a sundae. Soon enough my sister and husband had finished their cookies and wanted some of my sundae, which I did not want to share. They had had theirs, and this was mine. CLH insisted, explaining, "We're grown-ups now. If we want more, we can have it."
My epiphany was not that as an adult I could have more, but that I could share without resentment. I had aspired to this as an articulated concept since I read Ursula LeGuin's Eye of the Heron, but this was the first time I knew I was practicing it.
After a late breakfast and due at the gondola by 4, we didn't do much in town besides find my sister's friend and poke about in a cookery store. Then we strolled along the Roaring Fork trail for a while, sucking in deep breaths of aspen and black willow cottonwood and everything else on offer in a high-altitude riparian environment. Then we repaired to the hotel to dress.
I have got to get new dress shoes. It doesn't help that I am not fond of shoes. One pair of grey satin pumps would go with every single one of my best dresses, since every one of them (four) is an ice tone. I found the current pair almost four years ago and they are, besides stained, fucking uncomfortable, bearable only with doses of talcum powder and bandaids on my heels, which latter I forgot. We walked less than half a mile? to the gondola and at the top I asked at the lodge for a band-aid. A band-aid, because at that point only my left heel was cut through. By the end of the night, my right heel was sliced through too.
Anyway! The top of Ajax Mountain is no sucky place to get married. Snow-capped mountains ring the top. They were not as capped as in 1995, when friends of CLH got married up there; the photographs she brought to my wedding were the first I saw of Aspen. But they were white and shiny and lovely. The ceremony was funny and perfect; and the bride lovely of course.
I love that almost every wedding dress I have ever seen is exactly right for its bride. This wedding and EJB's are the two loveliest I have seen (except my own). They had in common gorgeous settings (this one far more spectacular), personally perfect services (EJB's had far better grammar), gracious service (this one had better food as well), but also they had nothing in common other than us and another pair of attendees--one woman works with TMB and is the cousin of this groom. And how each dress suited each bride, but that's something every wedding has in common.
The bride tugged me and others behind a pair of microphones to be back-up singers during "Mustang Sally." The next day when we ran into Ernie and his wife Seahorse, who had not stayed that long, for breakfast, I said I didn't have the moves to be a back-up singer.
"All you need is a tight black dress," Ernie suggested.
"I have one of those," I said. "It wasn't tight when I bought it [1990], but it's tight now."
"I have that dress!" Seahorse said. "Damn drycleaners."
RDC did say that throughout the wedding he noticed that I was much more comfortable talking with strangers than I have been in recent years. I am not sure that's true. On the gondola going up, we chatted with another couple, and the three of them were out-Colorado-ing each other so I shut up. It might be state pride, which is fine and which, oceanless as Colorado is, I could participate in, but it sounds like boasting. But otherwise I was chatty. Mostly with my coworkers and their spouses, but also with spare people. And during a tussle with another guest, which might be too hairy a story to post, though I don't think fast on my feet, my refusal to confront or to escalate or to speak disdainfully didn't leave me anxious and shaky. Instead I shook it off. And that is certainly better.
A side note: another road trip, another celebrity death. One major figure we haven't been away for is John Kennedy Jr. And slightly less major, Johnny Cash. The actor deaths in threes we tend to be home for too. But to date, Elvis Presley, Jerry Garcia, Princess Diana, Mother Theresa, Frank Sinatra, Charles Schultz, and Ronald Reagan.