Reading: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

Watching: town and the tops of mountains

Moving: not much

8 September 2002: Jackson and Teton

Jackson was having its version of the Taste of Colorado and the Cherry Creek Arts Festival in its elk-antlered town square. Those took about ten minutes.

We did a small amount of wandering through shops, including one that sold furs, heads, and whole stuffed critters, including jackalope. I stroked some furs, whole dead skinned pelts, and remain mystified about the appeal of wearing fox or mink, but then I touched a cloud, an incredibly voluptuous fur whose label identified it as beaver. Zounds. I suddenly understood the demand for furs that sent European trappers and traders through the American west. I had been being all clinical up to that point and wasn't pleased at how my detached observation flipped into carnal pleasure.

Town wore itself out pretty fast and we motored up to Teton Village to take a tram up the ski mountain. People ski down this chute.

The hotel served a reasonable breakfast and over it we chatted with a man from Vermont. Afterward, RDC said he seemed somewhat sad. The man'd mentioned he was moving to Philadelphia because of his friend, and I suggested that anyone would be sad to leave rural Vermont for a city. The "friend" bit was pretty coy too, but that evening when we saw him at the Off-Broadway Grill (the hotel had recommended it to both of us), he was with a woman. A woman at whose appearance my eyes widened. RDC remarked it too. My mother has updated her eyeglasses but still wears her hair over her ears, which was the primary similarity. Also the "roughing it" flannel shirt in grey and white checks, checks large enough to host inch-long red hearts to make the shirt cute.

Our tables adjoined and we chatted with them on and off. They were high school and college sweethearts, back together for a year, a month, and a day ("but who's counting? I am!" said the woman, reinforcing the resemblance) after two marriages apiece. We talked about national parks and vacations, mostly, and RDC noticed when the word "Nantucket" focused the attention of another table.

So later that other table asked if we had a house in Nantucket and we started talking to them. They first said they lived in Boston and then clarified a suburb (with a house in Nantucket too, poor dears), and when the man asked where in Denver we lived we said central Denver, not one of the suburbs. He commented on how the city's grown, and I said it's really the 'burbs that have grown, Douglas being the fastest growing county in the country, partly because of population shift but also because it's such a breedernest.

They leapt on that, nearly seizing our lapels in their need for an explanation of our generation. Their daughter, who, it turns out, is our age and was professionally employed, has left paid employment and is gestating for a third time, with her eldest kid not yet five and this pregnancy a double, and why would a smart, educated, professional person do this.

We had a good conversation, with me even remembering to couch as tactfully as I could my more inflammatory opinions. But they picked the wrong people to query if their aim was to understand their child's motivations and desires, which are as out of our ken as they are out of her parents'.