Reading: Ummmm, nope

Moving: a couple of miles along the Nipmuck trail

Listening: Conversation

Watching: leaves. NBM and ZBD playing together. The Fenton flowing

Learning: About the Gurleyville Gristmill

8 October 2000: Sunday

Too long ago now.

We staggered up and went to SEM's house. His mother, NBM, wanted to see us all and had offered brunch. She had never met ZBD at all, so probably hadn't seen HEBD in years. (HEBD's hair, incidentally, is truly that amazingly thick--lots of it and each strand strong and hefty. I have big hands, and the heft of her cabled braid escapes the span of my hand. ZBD played shy for about four seconds, and then they played with all NBM's toys.

When RDC and I visited NBM in 1998 during that visit home, someone knocked on the door and I got up to answer it and there was SEM in miniature. I knew it was one of his half-brothers but I hadn't seen either one since 1992 and I had to ask. It was JEM. Today both brothers came over, and Nisou and HEBD hadn't seen either and I hadn't seen MMM since he was out of diapers. Of course, he didn't remember any of these three babysitters. And JEM isn't really SEM in miniature. SEM is a blend of his parents though he looked much more like his mother as a boy than he does as a man. The elder of his two half-brothers looks like their common father; the younger favors his mother much more.

These are SEM's father's children, but all the parents get along and NBM babysat the boys frequently when I lived with her during grad school. Now they live nearby and the boys are always in the house, along with all the other kids in the neighborhood. That's how NBM knew ZBD's shyness wouldn't last. "Kids usually like me," she said, and that's because she usually likes them.

And that's true. She was not Mrs. M when I first met her but Mom M (I started using her first name when I was in grad school, I guess). When we were undergrads she lived within walking distance of campus and gave us pancake breakfasts on Sundays, and cooked elaborate Chinese meals before the Kodo Drummers' shows (who are Japanese), let me live in her house when I was wildly depressed for an unbelievably low rent, and then, when I told her I was engaged, her first words were (after "Congratulations!"), "Let me give you a shower."

I am blessed, I say, to have had so many mother surrogates.

So. At some point Saturday I said I would love to go for a walk Sunday along the Fenton, and in the afternoon we did. I can't believe I haven't seen real foliage for five years. The aspen turn a velvetty golden (after you've driven into the mountains to see them) and the cottonwoods turn a vivid yellow, but very few Denver trees and no native ones have red pigment. I have missed red. And Denver is flat, so I've missed hillsides full of color; a Colorado mountainside is too full of pine and spruce to offer a slope of metamorphosed leaves.

The Nipmuck trail runs along the Fenton River (and elsewhere, but I only know the Fenton stretch). From campus, you walk behind the cattlesheds and down the abandoned ski run, down down down, and find the river. We walked upstream from the grist mill campusward, and I scuffled leaves and ZBD marked the blue blazes with bubbles (from her miniature champagne magnum, from the wedding) from her perch on SEM's shoulders.

The hemlock are mostly dying, killed by a blight of a sort of bacterium blown up with one of the hurricanes. In the early 20th century, all the American chestnuts died, a phenomenon I had never heard of before reading A Walk in the Woods. In the '40s and '50s, most of the American elms died, a phenomenon I knew all about because my parents remembered it, because in Old Lyme, Lyme Street between the Congregational Church and Phoebe and maybe beyond, at least a quarter mile of wide, main street, used to be shaded with an arch of elms, long gone. In the '80s, we worried that Gypsy Moth catepillars would destroy all the deciduous trees in the northeast, and without natural enemies I don't really understand how they haven't yet. And now hemlocks. In this picture, yellow and red leaves are reflected in the water and bare branches show where hemlock needles should cover them.

Afterward, AMB gave us a tour of the Grist Mill. Built in 1730 and last updated in 1820, the mill hasn't been altered in 180 years. Much. The wheel is gone and the river's been restored to its proper banks, but all the equipment and whatnot are there. Few grist mills survive because so many blew up; they blew up a lot because the various flours are highly combustible. Who knew? It's so unique and pristine that Sturbridge Village wanted to buy its works but Joshua's Trust, a conservation group, said nope. AMB is a docent of the museum, and he loves a good story and finding out peculiar details, so he gave a good tour. He was telling us why grist mills blow up and how smoking wasn't allowed in them and the various precautions, all the while standing with one foot on the fender of the woodstove. No smoking, sparks bad, flour combustible, yes yes yes, but the miller would have had a stove for heat.

By this time I was wondering where RDC was. I expected him to get a slow start after the bachelor party and to have maybe a wee headache, and the tux place where he'd be fitted wouldn't be open until noon, but now it was after 4. When I called him, barely getting service though nearly at the top of the hill, he was coming along I-84, barely getting service ten miles from Hartford. It's not just that Storrs is the middle of nowhere; it's also that our phones are from a different company.

But anyway. When he arrived, we were all in the hot tub, but he'd just got out of EJB's and was pruney (skin-wise, not temperament-wise) and unwilling to get in again. Besides, we were all being kicked out in honor of Charenton's other dinner plans. MCB, leftmost in the picture above, had won a cuddly spot in the Heart o' Lisa by bringing me tea with honey while I basked in the hot tub, and I was waiting for the tea to take effect. He and the Ds were going to find pizza somewhere, and SEM was off to see an old friend, and I had happily made plans with RJH. I wasn't sure if I were tired (the tea) or getting sick with a sore throat (the honey), but I hoped I wouldn't ruin the evening.

The last two times I saw RJH were, one, on 395 as CLH and I fled the scene of our grandfather's funeral (RJH and I waved at each other desperately but CLH was disinclined to pull over), and two, last November on campus when I kind of just slightly disrupted his grad independent study class. Hi. The time before that was in 1998 when RDC and I stopped at his house on the way down to Old Lyme. Another friend of RJH's was there at the same time, and RJH said this time would be better because there'd be no one else. I pointed out that in 1998, the friend and RDC had geeked out conversationally leaving RJH and I to gossip and follow our own usual bizarre untraceable trains of thought unmolested, so the other friend had been a good thing. Anyway, this time we'd have a meal and a decent chunk of time.

Willimantic offering the wide array of dining choices that it does, we tossed a coin between the Victorian Lady and the Main Street Café and wound up at the latter. RDC and I had never been there before; it's in a former post office building constructed when Willimantic was a prosperous mill town (silk, not grains). So it's rather cavernous with three-storey ceilings. RJH's first idea was the bar, which is narrower if not shorter and therefore cozier. The only seating was in smoking and by this time I was definitely ill and didn't want to deal with that. Furthermore, just walking through the bar we saw two of the people we consider stuck in Storrs, in the kind of low-end job I would have if I had stayed there. MCB is temporarily squatting at his parents' house, and he won't go out around Storrs because he doesn't want to be mistaken for being stuck there. That was another reason not to stay in the bar.

We stood in the vestibule waiting to be seated in the dining room and I maybe couldn't see straight by this point. RJH began to say, "I don't think you'll escape seeing people you know here in the dining room either," and hadn't finished his sentence before I was having the stuffing hugged out of me by the person who knew me. (When I first wrote that sentence, I wrote "the hugging stuffed out of me," because I wrote it Monday on the plane going home when I was very ill indeed.) RDC had been disappointed he wouldn't see JCC and ALN, who had plans that prevented their joining us on Sunday: it turned out that their evening plan was to have dinner with some high school friends of ALN--at the Main Street Café. So RDC and JCC did end up seeing each other, which was great.

We met their friends and sat down at our own table and would have had a much more pleasant meal if I hadn't been dizzy and freezing cold. JCC joined us for a spell, lifting my feet from the fourth chair that I was using as an ottoman, sitting down, and replacing the feet in his lap. As it happens RJH is good friends with a professor both RDC and JCC had a few classes with, back when we were undergraduates and didn't mix, or shouldn't have mixed as much as happened, socially with professors. So some Billy stories were exchanged. Also RJH didn't know that JCC is a doctoral student in his own department.

I was a complete toad. I got a turkey club so I could dismember it and eat its cheese and tomato. I don't remember a single morsel of conversation. All I know is that I was glad to see RJH even though I wasn't making it easy for him to enjoy seeing me and that I was happy RDC and JCC got to see each other and talk and that I was as out of it this night as ALN had been Saturday night.

JCC brought RDC and I together. RDC and I had gone out in groups of people and were maybe beginning to be interested in one another, but I didn't know anything about him and knew I was in danger of Relationship Just Because, unable to tell whether this person really was Worthy. He saw some of my photographs and that's how it came out that he knew JCC, had roomed with him his sophomore (JCC's freshling) year and, in RDC's words, had been like brothers. It was then that I knew I could trust RDC and it was really him I was liking. That's why we had JCC read at our wedding, the one friend we each had independently of the other.

(And I returned the favor. When he visited us in 1993, shaking his head at the strangeness of seeing us together, such different people from such disparate times in his life, he asked if I had ALN's address. Why yes, I had. In 1996 they were married. Awwwww...)

Oh. One thing I remember. I told RJH that someone had riffed off the one medieval knock-knock joke--and he nodded, knowing what joke that was. Probably he knew it because he told me it, but also because, as I said, that's the only medieval one. Also I spoke in opposites, as I've been doing recently, except worse because I was stupider in my death throes even than usual. RDC said I should say "I've been speaking in synonyms" because that would mean that I've been speaking in antonyms but that was too confusing for me to work out.

Then RDC and I returned to Charenton and I announced I was dying (too much time looking at, or drinking, hemlock?). I changed into warmer clothes, JUMB made up a fresh bed and tossed a hot-water bottle into it, but I couldn't give up my last evening with my friends and returned to the living and lay on the floor in front of the fire with my head in HEBD's lap for her to pet and Nisou's feet in my lap to be warmed. Nisou had kindly given up the bed in the kitchen chamber for us and taken the window seat; I left her and HEBD in it talking about aspirations and goals and left MCB and RDC nearer the fire talking about why Harrison Ford is the sixth replicant, and I went to bed.