First day of fall

I've been dreading today, since it means winter is coming and summer is over.  But today we went on a hike to an old granite quarry in Becket and saw the early glimpses of color, and it was wonderful.  Another place to check out on your next visit to the Berkshires.  Fall is nice too, especially when the weather hits the mid 70s.  Unfortunately, we had to turn on the heat this past week, when it dipped down into the 30s at night.  On the other hand, still no frost, so our garden continues to produce - zucchini, cucumbers, tomatoes, potatoes, carrots.  We bought our first lettuce since July this past week, and our bumper crop of beans this summer is now officially over.

We realized today that this has been our first weekend without visitors or travel since we went to see Andrew and Lur at Green Lake in June.  (That was fun, by the way.)  Exhale.  We miss you all, though.

Last weekend we went to New York to fulfill a birthday gift to Mary to go see the play Wicked.  It was superior.  The last couple of musicals we had seen (Newsies and Avenue Q) were good, but not great.  Wicked is.  Highly recommended.  

We drove down with a car load of stuff for Annie that she had stored here over the summer.  We saw her new place (very nice) and then went out with her and Greg and Greg's mother at a Mexican restaurant that evening.  The next morning we went to St. John the Divine for church, but also to see the Xu-Bing sculptures of Phoenix suspended from the cathedral ceiling.  Those sculptures had been at MassMoca and they are magnificent.  We're kind of Xu-Bing groupies now.  But, we're also groupies of the Hungarian pastry shop across the street from the cathedral.  Should I mention that the church service was as long as the one that Joe, Margaret and Annie remember, and we didn't quite make it to the end.  We heard voices; they were the pastries calling us.

We understand that David was also in New York this week, for his long awaited hearing on insurance fraud - do I have that right?  Hope it went well.  The big news up in Fairport is the new cat/kitty.

Joe and Margaret helped each other move into their new places last weekend.  No fun, but it sounds like everything went well and now they just have to unpack everything.  By the way, rumor has it that Margaret and Andrew have a guest bedroom - without a bed, but soon to be remedied.  We talked with them both a couple of times, gearing up for the end of October bash.  

Speaking of gearing up, Mary and I have been busy getting ready for our trip to Gabon in January.  Lots of activity and lots of hurdles still to cross.  Not as much activity as my class I started teaching last week at Berkshire Community College for the local chapter of the life-long learning institute.  It's on history and foreign relations.  

Mary has started her tutoring of the Ghanaian high school boys, and has lots of stories, about their adaptation adventures here in Pittsfield.  She still has the best stories from her teaching.  And one more achievement for her - she found out this week she is the 11th best in the nation in breast stroke for her age group. OMG - and who knew that when I married her?  

One last funny story.  Last night, we went to the movies (Most Wanted Man, with Philip Seymour Hoffman, recommended) and afterwards we went to Baba Louie's for pizza dinner.  We were on our way to our table when the waiter told us to go back since the table wasn't quite ready.  In the door walks another couple, roughly our age.  Mary asked them if they had just come from the movies, because she wanted to chat about the movie we just saw.  They had, but they saw a different one, and as we talked the guy looked awfully familiar.  I said to him, you're not from Pittsfield, are you?  He admitted as much, and then I asked him if he was Peter DeShazo, a foreign service colleague of mine.  I didn't know what I would say if he said he wasn't the guy, but it was Peter!  He and his partner were out in Lenox for the weekend from Boston, and we ended up sharing a table and getting reacquainted.  Not sure whether to put this in the small world category or the what would have happened if our table had been ready category.

One more funny story - Joe wrote this week, and said he saw a guy at the Department of Treasury with a Black Panthers t-shirt.  Think about that for a minute. 

Let's end with another photo from Cincinnati.   Love from up here.

I remember...

I think those were the words most often voiced this past weekend in Cincinnati.  Although, truth be told, Andrew didn't remember much, as we left Cincinnati after he had just turned 6 and the last time he was there was in 1978.  

He did remember Tiger Kite.   How?  When we went to Indian Hill Church for, as always an emotional stop, we wandered inside the church, and Andrew came across a young man wearing a tie.  I should note here that none of us came close to that kind of dress, and Andrew with his bright blue shorts and yellow windbreaker, certainly looked out of place.  Anyway Andrew struck up a conversation with the young man who turned out to be our next door neighbor, on Cunningham Road, and best friend of Tiger Kite, the boy who grew up on the other side of our house.  It turned out the young man he met was not so young, seven years younger than me.  It got me remembering the baby born next door while we lived there.  Had to have been the same guy/baby.  

Anyway, there was one more coincidence worth sharing.  When we walked out of hotel to the game, we had barely made it one block when I noticed the sign on the other side of the street - House of Adam.  We have had many laughs over the years about the clothing Pop bought me in the African-American disco store in 1978 when we were looking for something respectable to wear.  That we should be so close to it and that it is still open, catering to the same African-American clientele, but 40 years older, must say something about larger forces at work in our universe.  

Did I mention the baseball?   The Mets thumped the Reds in the first game and the Reds squeaked by the Mets in the second game.  Needless to say, two of the three of us care way too much for these outcomes than we should at our age.  But how do you get it to stop meaning so much?  I will say this, I have never been to a game where the crowd was standing up for the last half inning.  Exciting (at least for me.)  And overall a most fun weekend.  

So where was David for all this?  Preparing for some big meetings, but more importantly, getting a new kitty.  Hardly a kitty, who weighed 16 pounds when they picked him up.  Another Maine coon cat (did I get that right?)  David pointed out that the cat weighed more than his grandson, Donald.  And will for a while longer it seems.  

David was keeping everyone in the loop about Aunt Georgia who had fallen a broke her hip.  She is still strong, and so had two hip replacements it seems and is recovering well.

So, where were Mary, Janet and Lur?  Staying at home, alone and missing their hubbies?  NOT.  Mary took advantage of the freedom and went to visit Marj in Rhode Island; Johanna got out of the city and had some quality time with Janet, and Lur was busy trying to keep Daniel from buying a new car.  

The stars have aligned in such a way that Joe, Margaret (Andrew too) and Annie have all moved into new apartments.  Buy stock in College Hulks Move Stuff. When we saw Margaret and Andrew in August, they were troubled by the infestations in the place they had just moved to.  So they were able to convince their landlords to release them from the lease, since they wouldn't take care of the critters.  We'll go down and see Annie's place this weekend, delivering some stuff she had in Hancock Rd storage.  And Joe has been in temporary housing since his return but has just found a place.

John and Marilyn came over before the weekend for dinner, as they were set to leave for their southern quarters.  They'll be back in November, which means they did not sell their house up here.  Strange.  

The week before Cincinnati, Mary and I went up to northern Vermont for a few days at Charlie's camp on a lake there.  Very rustic; we got an early peak at what the fall colors are going to be like.  We played dominoes with Charlie and his family, and Mary continues to dominate.  However, we have to watch her closely since Andrew found a domino on the floor under her seat out at Green Lake, where she also won.

It's September which means back to school, for Mary and for Annie and Margaret and Sean, Daniel and Claire.  But not for John.  That's naaaaiiiice ( as Borat would say).  I will be teaching an adult learning class for six weeks.  Mary's new teaching gig is at Pittsfield High School.

Oh, one more thing.  A young woman came into my office at UMass this week and wanted a Fulbright scholarship to Argentina to study chronic nappers and the effect on their cognitive abilities.  I raised my hand and said she did not have to go all the way to Argentina.  But she was adamant that she did because people here are discouraged and disparaged from napping.  Even ashamed.  Imagine that.  Boy, does she have that wrong.

And with that, have a wonderful weekend and a start to the fall.  Love from up here.

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