What a Rush

Throughout your life you develop gold standards. For me, the best mountains are the Alps, the best decade was the 70s, the best birthday cake is tarta baba with lots of lemon glaze, and the best falls are definitely Niagara.

It was 25 years ago that I first saw Niagara Falls. I was on the kind of wonderful road trip you take when you're relatively young-- it lasted weeks, and we went from Washington DC to Hamilton NY to Ann Arbor MI to Hustisford WI. In addition to the thousand and a half miles of North America we traversed, there was a wedding, a reunion of college buddies, and an island cottage along the way, but it all paled in comparison to Niagara Falls. The roar and the spray and the prisms of light stayed with me long after I returned home.

Since then I have had the good fortune to visit Niagara a half dozen times or more and they never disappoint. It doesn't matter if there's a crowd or that the water flowing over them is less than half its natural capacity, and never mind that the honeymoon thing is sort of baffling; I am even able to disregard the tacky merchandising that inevitably goes along with any stop there, because the falls themselves

are

simply

incredible.

No Complaints

I prepared my first meal with the majority of ingredients from my garden tonight. A nice vegetable stew with tomatoes, anaheim peppers, eggplant, squash, and okra-- seasoned with onion, garlic, and basil, and served over brown rice, it was a fine meal.

This is the time of the year when everything seems to explode in growth. Having been away from home for ten days and leaving town for another nine tomorrow, the progress of all the plants astonished and gladdened me when I went to check this morning. Our flowers have spread to fill their bed; our cucumbers, pumpkins and zucchini finally look as if they will amount to something, and aside from the vegetables I picked today, there are hundreds of green tomatoes on schedule to ripen in, well, just about nine or ten days (thank you, tomato goddess).

When we get back it will be canning time. Nice.

Trail Markers

After 12 hours on the road, we are home from our vacation in Maine. Something I love about hiking up there are the cairns that mark the trails on the granite ledges at the top of the mountains in Acadia National Park. I admire the elegant and functional transaction between humans and nature that these deliberately stacked sets of stones represent, and I'm glad for their guidance as well. Furthermore, unlike a modern GPS device, they offer their navigational advice in silence. Much appreciated, cairns.

Persistence of Memory

We’re listening to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows on this trip. All of us have read it, but for different reasons we want to re-visit the book. Personally, my motivation is two-fold: One of my brightest students last year read it over and over, assuring me that it was the best book of the series (if not the best ever written!).

The other reason is that when Deathly Hallows was released, I pounded through the book in a little less than 24 hours. At our house we had two copies, one each, and we spent the entire weekend reading and talking and reading. Three years later I find that I don’t have a very good memory of the book.

When I was a teenager, it used to amaze and amuse me how little recall my mother had of the plots of novels we knew she had read. My brother and sister and I mocked her mercilessly for her chronic case of literary amnesia. Of course at that time my brain was like a sponge, and it was easy to remember even the smallest things in minute detail. How could we know that it wouldn’t last?

Like everything about growing older, no matter how much you’ve seen it happen to others or even have come to expect it for yourself, such signs of aging seems incredible when they actually happen to you. Thus the Harry Potter audio book—it’s almost as if I’m experiencing it for the first time, and you know what? My student has an excellent point—it’s a good book.

Dog Years

I read a novel in verse a few years ago called Sharp Teeth, by Toby Barlow. Near the beginning he writes:

Everyone has a dog story to tell...
Each dog marks a section of our lives, and
in the end, we feed them to the dark,
burying them there while we carry on.

Today is my dog's birthday-- she's seven. Seven in people years, seven times seven in dog years. According to that common calculation, she is now older than I am.

Happy Birthday, Isabel.

Pancake Madness

Probably the most popular food item on our vacation has been, not lobster, but pancakes. We found a product called The Batter Blaster at the local Walmart. It is organic pancake mix in a whipped-cream-style can. The boys loved it for the wacky novelty of such a thing, so much so that they have each been motivated to cook their own pancakes for breakfast every morning. Of course they started with wild Maine blueberries, but soon they branched out to chocolate chip, then peanut butter. After that there have been all manor of flap jacks flipped around here this week.

I believe it's possible that The Batter Blaster is kind of a gateway food. Think about it-- once they're hooked on it, all someone has to do is slip them some real homemade pancake batter. Soon they'll be jonesing for pancakes seriously enough to start stirrring up their own batter, and after that it won't be long until they're cooking breakfast for everyone.

Yeah, that's it.

Lights, Camera, Action

It rained again up here yesterday, so we took the boys to see Despicable Me at a local cinema. It was definitely a retro experience, a lot like I remember the movies of my childhood. The theater itself was a simple cinder block structure, hung with some heavy velveteen drapes on the wall. The floor was poured concrete and the seats were no frills-- sensible upholstery over modest padding. They did not go all the way down to the screen, thus preventing that unpleasant neck-craning that is sometimes unavoidable if you arrive late to a popular show. It only cost us $27.50 for all five tickets-- twenty dollars cheaper than it would have been at home. The concession stand was also quite reasonable-- six bucks bought a small drink, a small popcorn, and a box of candy. The small drink really was small, too, far less than the 32 ounces they customarily serve in the theaters near us.

We sat back and watched the trailers, and then just as the feature attraction was to start, the lights came up and the manager announced from the rear of the theater that there was "a situation." We exchanged bemused looks. It turned out that 50 kids from a Y Camp were on their way to see the movie, too, and the manager wondered if folks would be willing to move forward to free fifty seats together. "The kids will really appreciate it," she said. Our audience was quite willing to oblige, so they held the movie, and the kids were seated in a little more than five minutes.

Somehow, I just can't see that happening at home.