… presses his case to the voters of Vermont.
The primary is tomorrow.
… have produced many Giant Puffball mushrooms. They’re out there right now, only yards from my office window. They look like the brains of aliens that have been dropped from spaceships. Effing ginormous.
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PUFFBALL UPDATE: In the space of an hour, I’ve gone from being repelled by them, to being afraid of them, to being fascinated by them (I got online and did some reading), to putting on my gardening gloves, picking through my woods, and pulling one of them up.
It’s not the biggest, but – in its pasty pocked surface-of-the-moon way – it’s the most lovely.
I took it to Mr UD, who held, stroked, and sniffed it. I took it to La Kid, who drummed it like a bongo and sank a nail into it. I sent an email to Gabe Mandel, my foraging chef neighbor, and told him to take the rest and cook them.
… for UD is receiving review copies of books on subjects of interest to her and her readers. UD knows that truly fancy people find getting these things annoying.
[click on the image for a larger view]
Indeed one of UD‘s memories from a long-ago weekend in John Kenneth Galbraith’s Vermont house involves her coming across, on a table by his bed, an enormous pile of review copies of all sorts of books. UD sat down in an ecstasy and lost herself in these just-published goodies, but it was clear that JKG himself didn’t feel as happy about it.
UD just picked up, at the Garrett Park post office (remember that her town doesn’t get home delivery), a review copy of White Coat Black Hat: Adventures on the Dark Side of Medicine, by Carl Elliott. She’s reading it now.
… under an incredibly violent, sudden, early morning thunderstorm.
August in Washington is all about hot afternoons with thunderstorms at the end of them, yes, but here’s something else: A storm that woke me at seven with what sounded like a direct hit on one of our trees. It scared me.
How can it be that there’s still electricity, still internet? How can I be writing this to you? Won’t my words be writ in water (Jeez. Another heavy hit just to the left of my windows.) in a matter of seconds? I’ll post this so that you and I have proof PEPCO allowed us this much …
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Long rolling thunder. Though at least now I can see something out of my windows.
Our lights have flickered, but we’re still connected.
Two fast-moving streams have formed on either side of my house. They rush out to the street, where they join the Rokeby Avenue rapids.
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The storm’s moved off. What’s left are dark green walls. That’s all I can see — massive trees darkly shining.
I’ve had that phrase from James Taylor’s song Walking Man in my head all day. Because one thing or another from morn til night hasn’t been right.
I’ve been staying in a ‘thesdan hotel for a couple of days – electrical trouble in Garrett Park – and as I chatted on the phone this afternoon with Mr UD (the Civic Studies Institute at Tufts just ended; he’ll be back from Boston soon) I looked idly out of my fourth floor window at the Rockville Pike.
“That has got to be the ugliest black cloud I’ve ever seen,” I said to him as I caught sight of a fast-moving mass off to the left. Behind it churned thick gray clouds. “Wow.”
The moment we finished talking, the cloud swooped onto the Pike – it looked as though someone had suddenly released canisters of tear gas – and a frightening wind and rain storm came up.
The speed of the thing! In an instant it was something out of Hurricane Andrew — vast horizontal rains, trees bending all the way down, stunned traffic edging away from the street, lightning streaks, a long horrible howling sound…
Clang. The electricity in my room shut down.
Should I go to the lobby? What if the door’s key card is electrical? I wouldn’t be able to get back in. On the other hand, I felt vulnerable in my room.
I called the front desk. “Stay in your room,” the woman said.
The storm quickly passed; the sun came out. I sat by the window and read Hitch-22. But the electricity stayed off, and the heat of the room became uncomfortable.
The front desk had no idea when PEPCO would get to the hotel, but they knew that an immense area was without power.
I packed, got a cab, and took another hotel room – a place in downtown ‘thesda which does, for some reason, continue to have electricity.
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All of this is by way of explaining why you’ve not heard much from me today.
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Update: La Kid and her friend Maura will join me in my hotel room. Maura’s family’s house is without power.
WAMU 88.5, UD‘s local public radio station, features UD‘s town, Garrett Park, on its Metro Connection show today at 1:00.
Here’s its teaser:
The Simple Life in Garrett Park
[Simple Life? UD leads a quiet but not simple life. Few people in Garrett Park lead a simple life.]
Nestled behind the Music Center at Strathmore, the cozy neighbor of Kensington and Rockville in Maryland, lies Garrett Park. [Already a confusing sentence. The writer – who likes cliches (nestled, cozy) – apparently means that Garrett Park is the neighbor, but the sentence reads as though the Music Center is the cozy neighbor.] This little town in a big city sits on 400 acres. Nearly as many houses make up Garrett Park and, according to the Census, there are fewer than one thousand residents.
It’s a place filled with the ringing of chapel bells – except when the bell gets stuck – and the rumble along nearby train tracks. Garrett Park has played home to inventors and authors, including Donal McLaughlin, the 102 year old who designed the emblem of the United Nations, and author of the children’s classic Ferdinand the Bull. [Longtime readers know that Les UDs own Munro Leaf’s house… Good thing this wasn’t a television thing, since by now my lawn probably looks pretty shitty…. Maybe the reporter will mention our two topiary bulls sitting in the pachysandra out front — tributes to Leaf.] This quiet preserve, filled with trees and children at play, is historically registered and for the most part completely unknown. Andrew Hiller goes to town.
… Fourth of July parade.
This will be a stuttering sort of post. I’ve just pulled my gray Adirondack chair forward to the edge of my driveway and have already been caught up in a long pleasant conversation with Caroline, a new neighbor. She’s British from the sound of her, but has a big ol’ American flag on her porch, a red and white bandanna on her dog, and plenty of excitement about the parade, which will be passing by our houses shortly.
I’ve put bug spray on. I’ve considered topping up the sphagnum on my topiary bulls and rejected the idea. They look okay. I’ve walked the dog and put him inside.
Here’s Mr UD, with some more chairs. “So where are the crowds?” he asks. Garrett Park has three hundred families, and our parades are très Lake Wobegone.
The weather is not hellish! Amazing.
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Sousa marches are sounding on Kenilworth Avenue!
Mr UD is telling me about a review he just read of the new Porsche Something. “The guy says there are two problems. Everyone is jealous and hates him for having one. And it goes too fast.”
More marches! Closer!
Mr UD says he’s not that excited. “It’s not like Netherlands beating Brazil.”
Mayor in an Audi convertible greets us: “Say hello to the Deputy Mayor.” A dog of course.
Guy in a Nixon mask: “I am not a crook.” (This year’s theme is Our Heroes. I’m confused.)
Firefighters.
Albert Einstein.
Soup kitchens.
Girl Scouts.
Washington Capitals.
La Kid and I took Mr UD out to dinner last night for a belated Father’s Day (we were in Utah on the day itself).
It was one of those strange outings during which absolutely everything goes absolutely smoothly.
We drove down Wisconsin Avenue to Bethesda on a beautiful mild summer evening with full sun and no humidity. Traffic moved well. We cracked ourselves up quoting lines from Borat.
Walentynka (our bright red car) purred into a parking spot right off Wisconsin and La Kid hopped out, her hand overflowing with quarters for the meter.
She wore a light blue summer frock. Her very blond hair was pulled back by a white headband. She looked like Grace Kelly with glasses.
Mr UD wore one of his Father’s Day presents – a beige Polo shirt. He gave off a gated community aura.
I’d never been in a Ruth’s Chris Steak House before, but I chose it because Mr UD is a raw steak man. The place is effusively friendly and very beautiful. It has dark wood and heavy crimson drapes, like the Harvard Club. Unlike the Harvard Club, though, it’s very light inside. The Harvard Club is dark, like a massage parlor.
Our server was crisp and bubbly and attentive and spoke at serious length about the meat. Mr UD enjoyed this.
When he left, though, we felt adrift, all of us flipping though the big heavy menu full of history and meat lore and complex ordering strategies. The only thing I knew for sure was that I wanted a pomegranate martini.
As the server served my drink — loud crashing of ice as he shook it and shook it before pouring it into a triangular glass with lemoned sugar on its brim — he helped us make sense of the menu. Mr UD settled on a rib-eye with the tonnage of a cargo ship, while La Kid and I chose delicate petite filets.
It was a Thursday night, and the place was full. I’d figured this as a business lunch spot, all the denizens of ‘thesda’s skyscrapers pulling in at around one; but it did a hell of a dinner business too.
So our steaks were high and fluffy just like the bread pudding La Kid and I shared for dessert… Pretty much everything in the room looked like steak with sauce running off of it, or maybe that was just how it seemed to me, under the influence of so much steak… But look at this photo of their bread pudding, taken from the restaurant’s website. (Click on the image.)
After dinner we took a walk in the little park behind the restaurant and everyone was extremely happy in every conceivable respect.
Just one of those rare totally smooth outings.
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HOLD THE PRESSES!
Mr UD points out two rough, not smooth, moments last night:
1.) The server swept by at one point and complimented me on having ordered the salad with blue cheese. “BUT you had ordered the salad without blue cheese.”
2) Although Mr UD ordered cappuccino, “he brought me espresso.”
UD, a fervent amateur pianist, plays a modest baby grand at home. This unassuming instrument seems right for UD‘s skill level.
But she can’t help be excited about the news that an anonymous donor has just given 28 big Steinways to George Washington University’s music department — located on the first floor of the building that also houses, on the sixth floor, UD‘s office.
Six floors down from my desk! 28 beauts!
Of course I’m not worthy of them. Of course it would be an obscenity, UD tromping down there with her Baroque for Babies books…
But I can dream…
He liked to ski, and one of his children attended George Washington University. The couple donated money to the university during the 2008-09 school year.
Details about a husband and wife recently arrested in Boston for spying for Russia.
… but you’re not really impressed, and I have little to share other than my mild discomfort, and my eagerness to get to Park City.
Later.
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Whoa! Fantastic jagged snow-topped peaks! On an absolutely clear … Gotta close this up.
In her place has appeared a garter snake.
Garter snakes, like all snakes, are meat eaters. Their diet consists of almost any creature that they are capable of overpowering: slugs, earthworms, insects, leeches, lizards, spiders, amphibians, birds, fish, toads and rodents.
… on her doorstep. She is not sure why
she is proud of this — why she’s proud
that a toad has chosen her doorstep on
which to settle and eat bugs — but she is.
As with a previous toad who lived on her
doorstep, UD has named it Elphaba.
Savannah’s one strange place. They’ve kept it as it was when Oglethorpe laid out all the squares – Orleans, Pulaski, Monterey – and they’ve let the oaks and the palms and the moss go wild in the wet air.
Everything’s muddy, muggy, muzzy.
In the middle of the squares immense cistern fountains push more water skyward.
Savannah’s green and gray and silver canopies, its sheltering and embracing branches, seem to keep time at bay. Each mild day rises gradually out of the greenery, and the growing warmth keeps you too at a gradual pace. On Jones Street you have time to notice how the houses glow with the love of people who’ve trained the potted vinca and straightened the liriope leading to the portico. How did they get those tiny leaves to stick to the sides of each one of their steps? How many years for each curve in the topiary next to the pond?
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Now settle down, Savannah says, as you hurry up the shallow steps from the river back to Bay Street. All the time in the world, and it’s too hot to make a race of it.
The river sweats behind you, and you think of the oil in the Gulf and whether it’ll come here and make the gray Savannah black.
Meanwhile, there’s the Sweet Georgia Peach martini you just had back there, on the roof of Rocks on the River; and there’s the big view the roof gave of the white-cabled Talmadge Bridge across to South Carolina.
Even up there, in the too-bright sun, Savannah seemed submerged, the pale marsh grass across the river the outer skin of an invisible deepwater life. We walked, my sister and I, through the Oatland Wildlife Center along the marshes one afternoon, and my eye didn’t want to leave the pale green expanse once I saw an osprey break out of the water. I knew that living along the marshes meant seeing bits of secret life fly out of the depths.
The long green marshes reminded me of Bali’s rice fields.
Savannah was placid everywhere. Along the river, in the squares, on the edge of the marsh. Even shrieking birds angling right down to you from the crepe myrtles seemed part of the soft odd Savannah harmonic. Historic preservation really means please be quiet.
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UD‘s currently angling down in an airplane to Dulles Airport. We’re skimming a massive cloudflow. Now we’ve pierced the clouds and it’s bumpy.
These quick trips to elsewhere are a kind of consciousness-nudge. The mind in its usual rounds is set going differently, and, in some inscrutable way, altered for good.