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Saturday May 20, 2000
"It's what the guests say as they swing out of the drive that counts.." Anonymous, Quoted in the New York Times in 1947
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the view from here Slept good. And long. Woke feeling good and tucked into my lovely Capresso. I unpacked most of my bags and organized a little. Forrest followed me and I took the Buick to his parents. His mother stood at the curb, waiting. She'd opened the gate that swings across the driveway. A gate, if I'm not mistaken, that they'd gotten so they could contain one dog or another of ours when it visited. Forrest's dad stood at the garage, signaling me to pilot the car into the garage. We all fussed over the exact inch to stop to be able to shut the door and give them maximum room around it. It is a one car garage but it has a little workshop on the side about four or five feet wide. Forrest's Dad has made it a little refuge. He has an eight track tape player and a turntable. "Wait until she sings 'Crazy'," he says, cranking the volume on a Patsy Cline eight track. I look at a frame, hanging askew on a nail containing his moisture-stained high school diploma from 1928. He shows me neat little carrying cases with all eight track tapes, their labels peeling. Elvis. Willie. George Jones. He bought all this stuff, player and tapes, at garage sales. He shows me a golf club he's repairing even though he really can't see well enough to do it. Then we look at plants. This is blooming, that his mom got on sale for $1.50 and repotted, this she bought at a garage sale and isn't it doing well? Forrest's dad wants to know if we have a long outdoor power cord he can borrow. Why? He wants to edge. He has an edger. He also has a yard man to edge, but he wants to be useful. He is 89. He is legally blind and has a bad knee. But he's a little bored and wants to be useful. We meet one of the neighbors cats, Orphan Annie, and discuss the others. The in-laws care for them when the young neighbors travel. "Where is your cane, Toddy?" Florence asks. "In the garage." He says. We are in the front yard now. "He walks away from it and I have to go back and get it." she asserts. We swing by Park Place. We think there are chinch bugs in the yard because of a brown spot. The folks think it is fungus ("wait until August for chinch bugs") and sell us an expensive bag of fungicide granules. It's getting close to lunch time and we decide on 34th Street Deli. It's early enough that we get a place to park in front. We enjoy a nice bowl of gazpacho, fresh tasting with the olive oil, tomato and vegies in perfect balance. I have a Caesar Salad and Forrest some crab cakes. This will hold us until we have our wine dinner this evening. Forrest has to go by Capra and Cavelli and get some new pants he bought. We look around and talk. Business seems pretty slow. Everyone is busy with graduation. As long as we are close to Gardens, we go by. I rub the leaves of this herb and that until my hands have a pleasant pot pourri smell. Inside, I look at the expensive goods and translate the headlines in a French design magazine for one of the clerks. Forrest can't resist a couple more plants. Today's New York Times cites a new scholarly journal (online only): The Journal of Mundane Behavior. You've know I've spoken here about how I like pictures of people's desk drawers, cluttered offices, commutes, packing boxes, spills, stains, etc. About how some of these mundane but poetic pictures would not be taken but for the online journals. The nonscholarly journals of the mundane. So, these guys should do a schloarly study of the minutia of these journals that, due to the plethora of same, somehow adds up to sense, rather than not. At the same time, they can undertake a study of why people chose the backgrounds they do for their pictures of ebay treasures. Don't you think it's fascinating to see people's patios, decks, yards and kitchens in the background? I especially liked the guy's photo of some shiny chrome deco thing which reflected his image with camera in face. Which brings me (seamlessly) to another disappointment in my online life. They quit posting the exact numbers! Ebay now says something like 'over four million things for sale.' Is it going up? Drifting down? When will it cross five million? Will it? I was about to start publishing a little chart like a stock chart tracking this number. Of course, I understand why they don't want to do it. Still, I'm crushed. (By the way, they already had six or seven hundred thousand items when I started looking. Did anyone out there start sooner?) We'd been anticipating this wine dinner for a while. We bought it over a year ago at a benefit for THCWFF and public TV. We'd been planning the event for a month at least. That is Forrest and our hostess and the hostess' secretary had been planning it. I'd been looking forward to going. We drove to Anne and Les' house and drove around to kill time with them so we wouldn't be too early. Our destination had a front yard that was a war zone of dirt and heavy equipment. A guy we know from Gardens was pulling out of the driveway. The party wasn't in the house, but in the deck house. Maybe, that should be capitalized, Deck House. This house (in back of the actual house) contains a wine cellar, a living room facing the lake, a kitchen, an exercise area facing the lake, probably other stuff I didn't see. It is topped with a deck with a pool and a large pergola. There is an elevator dedicated to Liz Carpenter. The Liz Lift. Our party gathered and our wonderful hosts served us Charles Heidsieck Brut 1990 in the chilly cellar while the whether cooled off and the sun started drifting down. Waiters from Four Seasons passed little smoken salmon, portabello mushroom and sushi appetizers. On the deck, we admired the view of Lake Austin. Panels of glass about three feet square set every six inches or so protected us from falling while giving an unobstructed view. Looking up and down the lake, we could see a corner of Anne and Les' house to our left and, on our right, a spot on a hill that would be some other friends' house someday. "You can't see our house from here," I joked. Later the folks at my table discussed plants the deer wouldn't eat. "You live on the wrong side of the fault," I asserted. One and only one deer has been sighted in our neighborhood and he was lost. A Trimbach 'Cuvee Emile' Riesling was served and the sun bid farewell while we were served a charred tomato bisque soup accented with Gin, Shitake Mushroomss and Leeks. A spinach salad with goat cheese and poached pear followed. A scrumptious pair of plump crab cakes came next. I chose Salmon for my next course and enjoyed a 1995 Calera Mills Estate Pinot Noir with it. I could barely make a dent in that course. I wonder why? The dessert sampler looked great but I confess to sampling the samples. I did drink not one, but two, glasses of the Far Niente Dolce (1996) though. A favorite dessert wine of mine. I'm not sure what we paid for this dinner, but it was worth every penny charity received. Forrest sat at the other table. At mine we discussed real business models for businesses, stock market valuations, the mating of deer, ferns, building homes and landscaping. Good company, good food, good wine. Executive Chef Elmar Prambs sat beside me at the meal's conclusion and we discussed the soup (took him twenty minutes to whip it up) and his work day (he starts early, six or seven in the morning, and never asks his people to do what he would not do).
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