Lance Mannion

Taxonomy of birds in my neighborhood

Posted Saturday morning, January 15, 2021.

Blue jays are sociable, neighborly birds, and that’s how I think of them, as my neighbors. The sparrows that flock in the bushes outside the front door are tenants who probably regard us as indifferent landlords whose best quality is our habit of minding our own business and leaving them alone to mind theirs. The catbirds think they own the place, the robins do too, but they make it a practice of looking in the window disapprovingly, as if we’re riff-raff who are wasting our lives and neglecting the property. Mockingbirds come around just to mock me. Cardinals are like those couples who live up the street who seem to be enjoying more pleasant lives and are younger and more attractive and more accomplished than you. Geese are like the large family at the other end of the block who's always arguing about everything at the tops of their voices. The woodpeckers are like the people who work in your building whose jobs are more interesting and who do them better and with more diligence and less complaint than you do yours. The only birds I think of as friends are the chickadees and nuthatches, but they don’t visit as much anymore. I wonder what I did to offend them.

Photo up top of a Black-capped Chickadee is courtesy of FotoRequest/Shutterstock, via the American Bird Conservancy. For real Chickadee info, follow the link to Remarkable Bird Brain at ABC. Maybe they’re just too smart to want to bother with the likes of me.

Waiting for Popeye the Sailor Squirrel

Mined from the notebooks, Sunday morning, December 6, 2020. Posted Sunday morning, December 27.

A study in grays: Eastern Gray Squirrel with attitude. Stock image, various sources.

Oh, he moves through the tree with the greatest of ease
That daring young squirrel in the old maple tree.
His movements are graceful, all the world he does please,
But my good mood he is taking away.

I don’t like squirrels. They're rats with bushy tails who think they're cute. I like watching them, though. I like being able to watch them through our window playing in our neighbor’s big maple across the street. But it’s purely observational, objective exercise and I enjoy it only as an exhibition of motion, action and reaction, interplays of shadows and light, and complements and coordinations of colors, contrasts, shades, and tones, which, when it’s squirrels and bare branches, are all studies in gray. This morning, a particularly gymnastic squirrel, bigger than I’ve seen in a long while, with a broad, snow-white chest and a build like a circus strongman, is showing off. He has the tree to himself, so I’m guessing showing off is a habit with him. He’s moving along the undersides of the branches, hanging by his hind feet to reach whatever food he’s after on twigs and a foot below, leaping from branch to branch when a short scurry’s all that’s needed. I’m getting a kick out of him, not just because of the vanity I’m attributing to him, but because he’s reminding me of Popeye! Or, really, a “Popeye” cartoon, a specific one, “The Man in the Flying Trapeze.”

Smitten by the physical and personal charms of the trapeze artist who’s the star of the circus that’s come to town, Olive joins the circus herself to become the trapeze artist’s partner, breaking Popeye’s heart. But the despairing sailor man goes to see his goil perform and while he’s watching, he sees that the trapeze artist is a reckless, self-infatuated bully, who uses Olive as a prop, terrifying her by tossing her around in the air like a rag doll and dropping her just to show he can catch her before she falls far. Popeye realizes she’s in trouble and climbs into the rigging to rescue her, where of course the trapeze artist, who is as strong as, well, a circus strong man, begins to toss him around and beat him up in the process. But then Popeye remembers to eat his spinach and you can guess the rest. The cartoon ends with the bully defeated and Olive and Popeye reunited. As I watch this squirrel performing his act, I’m hoping an Olive squirrel and a Popeye squirrel come along, joined by a flock of chickadees---shades of gray continued---to root Popeye on.

Now you want to watch the Popeye cartoon, don’t you?

Hopes and dreams on hold

Posted Thursday morning, September 17, 2020.

Mrs M's Hopes and Dreams jar with coins in need of counting and sorting. The jar's only a third full even though it's been almost a year since it was last emptied. Spare change is hard to come by these pandemic days since sensible people and retailers are doing their buying and selling with plastic.So it's going to be a while before we get to fulfill our next batch of hopes and dreams.

Other day I found a quarter on the floor of the laundry room of the homestead and my first thought was, Where did that come from?

The answer to myself should have been obvious.

It fell out of somebody’s pocket, Lance, you dummy, as they were loading the washer or unloading the dryer.

Should have been obvious. Would have been obvious in days gone by. It occurred to me that I’d grown used to something that’s been a consequence of all the precautions being taken since the pandemic altered every sensible person’s and retail business owner’s habits of buying and selling. Nobody’s carrying around pocket change. As much as possible we’re all using plastic and avoiding using paper and metal and the hand to hand contact the exchange of germy cash involves.

This is trivial and beside the point. And anyway it’s just accelerating a trend that’s been underway for a long time now. I was pretty much paying for everything with the bank card for years before using plastic became an act of hygiene. But it was curious to me to realize how I’d come to take it for granted, especially the no change part, considering what a rigamarole we Mannions went through when we dealt with found coins.

Many Mother’s Days past, when they were still in grade school, the boys gave Mrs M a ceramic jar for her to keep on her dresser and empty her spare change into at the end of the day, with the hope and the dream that when the jar was filled she’d use the money to buy herself something special she’d been hoping for and dreaming about. House rule, though, became that any change found in anyone’s pocket as the article of clothing equipped with said pocket was loaded or unloaded in the doing of laundry went into the Hopes and Dreams jar. Same rule applied to money found on the floor in any downstairs room of the house or in the cushions of chairs and couches. Most of these coins were ones that had jumped shipped from my pockets. I don’t have an explanation for it, but all my pants automatically dump change as if programmed. This didn’t happen as much when I regularly wore jeans, although back in the days when I regularly wore jeans my pockets were usually empty of money of any kind. At any rate, it used to be that we filled the Hopes and Dreams jar every few months with the tally when we emptied it out usually amounting to between fifty and sixty dollars, depending on the number of quarters. Our hopes and dreams usually didn’t extend beyond buying groceries for the next few days, which was convenient since the coin machine was in the grocery store---imagine that!

But here’s the thing.

When I spotted that quarter on the laundry room floor I made no move to pick it up, not even reflexively. I couldn’t make up my mind what to do with it. It was early in the morning, and if I went searching upstairs in the bedroom for the Hopes and Dreams jar, I worried I might wake Mrs M up. And I saw no point in pocketing it except as an experiment to see where it would wind up next when it inevitably spilled out of my pocket. If it defied the odds, where and when would I spend it anyway? Besides, as far as I know, found quarters aren’t as lucky as found pennies. So I left it there, figuring that when I came back later to put the clothes in the dryer, I’d have figured out what to do with it.

I didn’t. I haven’t. It’s still there. I’m leaving it for one of the Mannion guys to find. I’m thinking they’re still young enough to remember when a quarter was as rare and precious and valuable to them as a magic bean and they’ll snatch up on impulse.

Or if they’ll be faced with the same dilemma and rather than solve it they’ll leave it lie for someone else to deal with.

I dread going back to the laundry room.

Night Orchard Peaches

Mined from the notebooks and adapted from the Twitter feed and Facebook news feed, Tuesday, August 18, 2020. Posted Sunday morning, September 6.

Ain’t she a peach? Mrs M at Lakeside Farms, Tuesday, August 18, 2020.

Another note from the Department of In Search of Lost Time, by way of catching up with my August blogging:

Just back from another long explore. This one took us back out to Lakeside Farms again, and of course we had to stop in for pie and...peaches!

Not coincidentally, we picked up a peach pie.

A proper social distance to our left, a cheerful old couple in their seventies waited at the counter with us. He was white-haired, tall, taller than I am, but bent over his cane; still looking trim and dapper in a brown and white plaid shirt and sand-colored shorts, white socks pulled up to his knees. She was short, came up to his chest, blonde, all in denim blue. Both wore white cloth masks. They were buying vegetables. He eyed our pie box as the cashier set in on the counter. “What time should we come over?” he said.

“Anytime,” I answered. “We’ll be home all afternoon.”

When we finished cracking ourselves up, he asked what kind of pie we were buying. He approved our choice heartily. I asked him what kind they were getting.

“No pie today,” he said with not totally mock-disappointment. “Just the vegetables, I’m afraid.” He sounded as if we’d be disappointed to hear it. I was. “I’m sorry for providing the temptation,” I said, and again, I was. He and his wife paid and left chuckling. Well, he was chuckling. His wife was just giving him one of those looks.

Our turn to pay. There was something I was curious about. The sign out front of the market advertised “Night Orchard Peaches”. I asked the counter woman who was taking care of us---a sturdy, broad-shoulder blonde in her forties with a confidently smiling expression behind her mask and glasses---what “Night Orchard Peaches” are. I was wondering if they were a kind that were best picked at night or ripened overnight. Turns out they come from an orchard on a nearby farm owned by a family named Night. Live and learn.

Peach pie was one of Mrs M's specialties back in her baking days. She won awards! Sadly, these days pie baking is still beyond her. But the Lake Side Farm pie, made with Night Orchard Peaches I’m assuming, will probably do.

Filed under Sketches from the Album. Related post: "Liberals Bake Here".

Her first TV

Mined from the notebooks, Thursday morning, August 13. Posted Monday morning, August 17.

Screenshot via C-SPAN of California Senator Kamala Harris making her first speech as the Democratic Vice-Presidential nominee, Tuesday August 11, 2020. I didn’t ask the clerk at Barnes & Noble what channel she watched the speech on her new TV. It was none of my business, like a bunch of other things that were none of my business when she sold me my copy of Harris’ memoir. The important thing to her was that she had a new TV.

The clerk who rang up my copy of Kamala Harris’ memoir, “The Truths We Hold”, was a short, thin, white woman about my age, with wire framed glasses, dark graying hair haphazardly pinned back from her heart shaped face, her eyes smiling brightly over her surgical blue cloth mask. Her eyes got brighter as she slid the book under the plexiglass. “Did you see her speech?”

Her tone suggested she had and it had made her an enthusiastic Harris fan, if she wasn’t one already. It also suggested I must be one too. Why else would I be buying the book?

“I saw part of it. I came in late,” I said regretfully. I didn’t get into the problems I’d had getting it to stream on my computer. “I heard the best part was the beginning when she talked about her friendship with Beau.”

She assured me it was a nice tribute. I told her I hadn’t known they were friends. If I had I would have believed she was a lock for the nomination. “I don’t much about him,” she said apologetically. I resisted the temptation to mansplain the man. I said, "I think there's a section in the book dealing with him and their friendship," and left it at that. She said she looked forward to reading it. I asked for her impression of the whole speech but it turned out there was something she was more excited about than the speech itself---that she had been able to watch it. “I just got a TV!” she practically burbled. “It’s my first.”

This threw me a bit. A fellow boomer and it’s her first TV? I went quickly through the possibilities. She meant it was the first TV that was all her own? All her previous TVs she’d shared with her family, roommates, partner or spouse? That raised questions about her living arrangements and what became of the “owner” of the old TV, questions that were none of my business. Or was she one of those people who had not wanted a TV or hadn’t been able to afford one when she’d set out on her own and found she got along fine without one? So then, why had she decided to get one now? Had she inherited it? From whom and under what circumstances? Again, not my business. So I said, “Just in time for the convention.”

“I can’t wait!” she said.

“Let’s hope it’s all good news from here on out.”

“If it’s not,” she said, still cheerful but with a note of steely determination, “it’s going right back!”

Liberals Bake Here

Lifted from the album and mined from the notebooks, Wednesday, July 22, 2020. Posted Saturday morning, July 25.

Wednesday, on another one of our long explores, Mrs M and I wandered our way here, the pie case at Lakeside Farm in the town of Ballston in Saratoga County. We’ve passed it on several of our country drives since we’ve been up here at the homestead. They’ve been open since May 1, but until today we were able to resist the pull of their gravity. Lakeside Farm is an old Mannion family favorite, been there forever, long enough that I discovered it at secondhand when Uncle Merlin’s sainted mother Rosalie, who had a knack for discovering the best places for pie and coffee on her own long explores, sent me a dozen apple cider donuts when I was in grad school in Iowa. I have to confess: I didn’t share. Sorry, Steve. My apologies, Ann. Miller, I’m sure you understand. Wednesday we weren’t there for donuts. Or produce. Or charming country-themed knick- knacks. They have a farm stand on the ground and a gift shop, but we marched straight into the main building, properly masked and maintaining social distance, for pie. There’s a dining room. Andrew Cuomo gave the all-clear for indoor dining a couple weeks ago as long as every other table is kept empty, and a few of the occupiable tables were occupied. But the hell with that. Our plan was to take pie home for dessert. We went to the counter and debated our choices. I favored cherry or blueberry. Mrs M came down on the side of Dutch Apple. I lost the vote 1-1.

You can see in the picture up top the space where our Democratic pie had been waiting for us.

"What makes you call it a Democratic pie, Lance?" I hear you asking.

This, the sign on the way in the front door...

Not the big one on the door itself that says “PLEASE WEAR A FACE MASK.” The smaller one on the doorpost below the Boylan’s Birch Beer logo. See what it says?

“Stronger Together Saratoga County. Mask Required”.

“Stronger Together.” I don’t have to remind you whose slogan that was---and still is.

Lakeside Farm strikes me as Hillary’s kind of place. I’m even willing to bet she knows about it and can tell you whereabouts it is. She was our senator, remember, and she made a point of getting to know the state, the whole state. She liked to rove far north and west of New York City whenever she could. I don’t know what kind of pie she’d have bought if she’d stopped in. Probably all of them. She’s rich, after all, and, unlike me, she shares. But if she had stopped in when she was running for President, the press would have jumped all over her. Pie and farm stands are authentically American, and she never did anything authentic, you know.

Hillary grew up in the Midwest. She spent two decades in Arkansas. As United States Senator she represented a largely rural state one of which’s main industries is farming. But she had no affinity with the real, regular Americans and none of them voted for her. Unlike you know who. His voters were the real, regular Americans, and they spent the time in diners to prove it. Ask just about any political journalist. They’ll tell you.

Any old who. Our pie tasted authentically delicious.

Wear your mask. Socially distance. Wash your hands. Use sanitizer. And eat your pie.

Cardinal, sparrows, woodpecker, crow, and woodchuck clocking in: forty-five minutes in the daily life of the backyard

Mined from the notebooks, Friday morning, May 23. Posted Saturday morning, May 24.

"Can I help you?": File photo of a woodchuck via "Naturally Curious With Mary Holland".

8:00 a.m. Cardinals are the best birds.

8:15 Pair of sparrows coming and going. Down into the grass, up onto branches overhanging the far corner of the roof. I think they have a nest in the gutter.

8:30. Woodchuck nosing through the clover that’s beginning to cover the mud in the marshy patch at the back corner of the yard. Crow lands nearby. Woodchuck sits up and takes notice. “Can I help you?” Apparently he can’t. Crow takes off. Woodchuck goes back to his browsing.

8:35. Woodpecker clocks in.

8:45. Woodchuck dashes into the woods. Likely he’s spotted some wood that needs immediately chucking.

Honk and Circumstance

Posted Monday morning, May 18, 2020.

Gabrielle Pierce, Xavier University of Louisiana Class of 2020, at her driveway graduation ceremony in front of the stage and podium rented for the occasion by her father Torrence Burson. Gabrielle told CBS’ Steve Hartman that she thinks her commencement was “better than a regular one.” Image courtesy of Gabrielle Pierce via CBS News.

Saturday afternoon, on our way back to the Homestead after checking on the Mannion Ranch to make sure it was still standing and had not been taken over by squatters or squirrels, we swung by the SUNY New Paltz so Ken, masked and gloved, could drop off some books in the library drop box. While I waited in the car for him to return I watched a group of no longer college students posing for each other’s cameras by the outdoor stairs leading up to the main campus in bright blue caps and gowns. It should have been the day of their formal graduation. Instead they had to formalize their graduation themselves. It was a perfect day for it, bright and sunny, not too hot, but warm enough they didn’t have to wear jackets or sweaters under their robes. In fact they all seemed to have on their prettiest sundresses. There were six or seven of them---they moved around, switching places and taking turns as photographer, I couldn’t keep count---I don’t know what their connections were, housemates who stayed in town although classes had moved online, sorority sisters, just a group of friends, or simply classmates who’d arranged the photo op via social media. They were having a great good time, enjoying each other’s company, smiling broadly and laughing heartily. I’m sure the pictures they took came out beautifully. What could I do?

I stepped out of the car---they were about twenty social distances away---and standing by the door I honked the horn several times in as friendly a fashion as I could. When they looked over to see what the matter was, I applauded them heartily. They gave me big smiles, waved, and yelled thank you.

I’m guessing they would have preferred a traditional graduation day (although I don’t know that. They looked awfully proud and happy), although it probably would have included a moment like the one I was witnessing, only with family and guy friends around cramping their style. But I’d bet what they really missed was the real fun of the final weeks of classes leading up to commencement: the parties, the get-togethers, the just hanging out, the last chance to be together as classmates, roommates, housemates, castmates, clubmates, teammates, just plain mates, and friendly rivals, and, for many for whom the coming absences were already making their hearts grow fonder, actors-out of that fondness.They missed the group hugs and goodbyes. And they were probably regretting that they would not be celebrating as a class and have the opportunity to hear themselves applauded by a large crowd of strangers who for the moment it took them to receive their diplomas were no longer strangers.

But twenty years from now they will likely remember their graduation day more vividly than members of the Class of 2019. I hope those memories will be filled with more consolation than regret.

Yesterday CBS Sunday Morning had a story about how graduates themselves and their friends, families, teachers, neighbors, and communities are doing things to make graduation day special and memorable. My favorite, because I’m a dad, was the dad who built a stage with podium in the driveway and presented his daughter with her diploma himself in front of an audience of family and friends who parked their cars at the curb and stood (the proper social distance apart) at the edge of the lawn to cheer and applaud. But many of the improvised “ceremonies” looked like fun, a lot more fun than graduation ceremonies I’ve attended or ones I took part in. I didn’t enjoy my own high school graduation, mainly because I felt like I was somehow making a fool of myself in front of my girlfriend---the one who looked like Scarlett Johansson, not the one who looked like Elizabeth Montgomery---but then often felt like a fool around her, even though she didn’t ever seem to think I was a fool, although she wasn’t circumspect about pointing it out when I was being foolish. But the other big reason I didn’t enjoy it was that it didn’t feel like my graduation. It felt like I was crashing. That’s because most of my best friends had graduated the year before and most of the rest were a class or two behind me, that includes my girlfriends. The one who looked like Elizabeth Montgomery was a year ahead of me. The one who looked like Scarlett Johansson was two years behind me. I had a much more fun at the former’s graduation. (Uncle Merlin was in that class too.) But what I remember most vividly about that day was the visit to the hospital our gang made on the way to the ceremony to visit one of us who would not be making her scheduled graduation because she was recovering from a car accident she’d been in the night before. The car was totaled; fortunately, she was not.

Mrs M remembers her high school and college graduations with pleasure. She would, the little summa cum laude. Ken remembers his high school graduation day with pride, as he should, considering what a struggle he had getting through high school. He earned very good grades but it wasn’t easy for him. Oliver remembers his high school commencement as hot and boring. His college graduation, though, was something worse---his mother couldn’t be there, and neither could I. We watched it online from her hospital room. Two years ago tomorrow.

To end on a cheerier note, one of my brave, strong, and good-looking nephews (a description of all my nephews and nieces) was scheduled to graduate from SUNY New Paltz Saturday too, my sister Linda’s son and my godson. The students taking their pictures Saturday may have been Z’s friends. His housemates, all guys, are friends with a houseful of girls, and the girls stayed in town while the guys evacuated three weeks ago. Linda wishes Z and his housemates had arranged something similar, with or without their female pals. But that’s why women are going to rule the world when they finally push all the past all the lazy and complacent and self-privileged men standing smugly in their way.

The college is holding a virtual commencement this Friday, but congratulations ahead of time to Z and the rest of the Class of 2020! When you hear a car honking as it passes by your house Friday, that’ll be us, your aunt, your cousins, and me.

______________________________________________________________________________

To watch and read the Sunday Morning story, follow the link to “Parents and teachers pull out the stops to ensure memorable graduations for Class of 2020” at CBS. The plans to hold ceremonies in drive-ins strike me as unimaginative and sad. But the plan to let graduates drive their cars on the Indianapolis Speedway sounds like a blast.

There’s also a more serious companion piece looking at how this year’s high school and college graduates are facing the open question “What happens now?”---”For the Class of 2020, a graduation season like no other”. One of the students featured is still determined to start med school in the fall. She feels even more needed now. I think choosing to be a doctor now is like volunteering for the military during a war. It certainly shows more of a warrior spirit than storming the booths at your favorite diner without a mask.

Where to find Pop Mannion's ghost on his days-off from looking after Mom

Mined from the notebooks, Wednesday afternoon, April 15, 2020. Posted Sunday morning, May 3.

Report from today’s long explore. Wednesday, April 15, 2020:

West by southwest of here it gets hilly.

Not far to the north, east, and south are mountains---the Adirondacks, the Berkshires and Taconics, the Catskills, and the Poconos. Due west things level out, as the Thruway hugs the banks of the Mohawk-Erie canal, and the terrain from the eastern outskirts of Utica all the way into Syracuse is as flat and featureless to my prejudiced eyes bored by many trips to and from Syracuse. as any stretch of the Midwest. In fact, I think of that stretch of flatness, dullness, and grayness and coldness---it’s the snowiest region in the state, snowier than Buffalo---as the beginning of the Midwest, geographically, economically, and culturally.

But the hills we were exploring don’t feature in my mental map of New York State.

Long, long time since I’d been out here. Even when I was growing up we rarely made it out here. In fact, I have only two clear memories of having been out this way, both are from high school, one is happy, one is dispiriting, neither was triggered by anything we saw on our drive. It was the place names that recalled them, not the landscape.

I suppose geographers would call these foothills of the Catskills. But to my untrained eye the area looks like a place where the glaciers just sort of casually bumped through on their way south and then on their way back, leaving the landscape looking like a badly made bed with a lumpy mattress and sprung springs, a homely metaphor to describe some beautiful views: long downward and upward curves through hills and valleys covered with meadows just turning green, woods full of mostly bare trees just beginning to flower, and here and there punctuated with small clusters of one and two story buildings, houses and businesses, that can only be generously called towns, and here and there a barn, a cowshed, a farmhouse.

Driving in the mountains you can’t see the mountains for the mountainsides, cliff faces, and ravine bottoms around you and closing you in. Out here the hills are always in sight. When you crest one set of hills you look out at the next set rolling and rising ahead of you.

At the summit of one steeper hill is a Presbyterian church matter-of-factly calling itself Christ’s Church of the Hills. Its address is Schenectady County but it might as well be Grover’s Corners for all the sense there is of the city that’s home to General Electric’s main plant being nearby. The church is closed because of the coronavirus and services are taking place online. On the marquee out front it says ‘Faith, Hope, Love, and Patience, Especially Now.”

I didn’t mean to drive us this far west. I had a turn-around destination closer to the Old Mannion Family Homestead in mind when I set course, but I misremembered the route, overshot it, and I had to guess my way back around. Took an hour or so, traveling in a wide circle to the west, north, and finally eastward to one of Pop Mannion’s signature building projects: The Mabee Farm Historic Site on the southern bank of the Mohawk River in the nearby village of Rotterdam.

Pop was a builder. His most significant architectural achievement was the new town hall, twenty-five years ago, but looking as handsome, square-lined, pointed, clean-bricked, and brightly trimmed as it did the day he stood out front and dedicated it. Pop intended it to be built to last as long as the buildings on the campus of the University of Virginia his second-favorite president and inspiration designed and built have lasted. He built two parks, and a bike path, and helped build a boat. He had his hand in the construction, renovation, remodeling, and expansion of more than half a dozen buildings around the county, including the county nursing home he was in until the day before he had to be moved to the hospital where he died. “I sign your checks,” he joked to one of the doctors at the nursing home, before the pain and the pain-medication took away his lucidity, and he could still remember that he’d been the treasurer for the committee.

The boat building took place when he was president of the Schenectady County Historical Society, one of the jobs he held in his stint as the most unretired retired man in town. The Onrust was built in the big Dutch barn on the grounds of Mabee Farm. During his tenure as president, he oversaw the restoration and repurposing of the farm buildings and the expansion of the property. The boat building was really the work of other organizations and Pop had little to do with it beside making sure the barn and the grounds met the needs of the boatwrights and the boatwrights respected the interests of the Historical Society. But he was proud it was happening on his watch and he took more than a landlord’s interest.

In the first few months after Pop died, Mom Mannion moved into her new digs at the memory care facility and we began using the homestead as the family B&B, concerned relatives and friends would routinely ask if we didn’t feel Pop’s ghost haunting our visits. Usually my answer was a noncommittal "Not really." I didn’t answer “I don’t believe in ghosts.” I certainly didn’t answer “I don’t believe in life after death.” But if I had I would have added that if I did, I wouldn’t believe Pop was haunting the house. He’d be too busy watching out for Mom over at her place. And if he needed a break and some time to himself, he wouldn’t choose to visit the house. He wouldn’t go to his favorite places, Cape Cod and Lake George, either, because he couldn’t bring Mom. So where would he go?

I think here...

Pop Mannion showing Uncle Merlin around the grounds of the Mabee Farm Historic Site in December 2011, back when Pop was president of the County Historical Society and the farm was his lookout and one of his favorite places to spend a day.

Forsythias forsything and other spring news from the front porch at the Mannionville Ranch

Adapted from the Twitter feed, Wednesday morning, March 25, 2020. Posted Thursday, March 26.

This morning's Spring report from the walk I just took around our neighborhood: forsythias have forsythed!

On the porch now with my coffee and "Sibley's Field Guide to Birds of Eastern North America". An interesting fact I'm shocked at myself for having learned only just now. House Sparrows aka English Sparrows and the most common sparrows in this neck of the woods----although they shun the woods, preferring to be closer to people for the easy pickings more than for the company----aren't classified with most other sparrows. Sibley has them and Eurasian Tree Sparrows forty pages over, with the finches.

Speaking of bird books. I didn't post this here. It's my birthday present from my sister Laura. (February 28, by the way.) She didn't actually pick it out. She sent me an electronic gift card while I was coincidentally at Barnes and Noble and I put it right to use…

Birds are having a high old time of it. Blue jays, cardinals, blackbirds, sparrows, robins, and one white-breasted twitterer too small and high up in the trees for me to make out without my binoculars which I can't lay my hands on in the clutter that's taken over our living room.

Point is though I can still see him. And I can see those other birds going about their routines. So I know I'm not being fooled by the local mockingbirds, unlike the other morning…

Coffee's gone. Thinking of going inside to make a new pot but it's just so nice out here, despite it being 34 degrees and the sky gray.

But I think I've done my bit to give folks something else to think about while we all self-isolate. That's the news from Lake Woebegone for now. What's going on your way?

PS. An actual message from Lake Woebegone or rather from its village historian, Garrison Keillor...

"This is my complaint against poets: they write for each other, knowing that nobody else is interested, and for that reason nobody else is interested."

More news from there here…

PS 2. Now there's a mockingbird to see. He's beating around our bushes, doing his best blue jay impression, sounding more like a blue jay than a blue jay. He found another way to mock me, though. He's staying close enough for me to hear the flapping of his wings and the picking of his beak on twigs that promise him insects for breakfast, but he won't stay still in one place long enough for me to get a good picture. Guess this will have to do...

Prime at the Pumps

Lifted from the album Tuesday morning, February 18, 2020. Posted Wednesday morning, February 19.

WaWa Market, Route 202, King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. Tuesday morning, around nine. February 18, 2020.

Amazon's opened a new distribution center near the Blonde Family Cottage since our last visit. There were nine of these vans at the pumps when I pulled in to get gas for our drive home from Pennsylvania yesterday morning, and more pulled in as the others pulled out. When we were on the road a few hours later, we counted ten semis with the Prime logo on their cab doors and trailers within honking distance of each other on the overheads and crossroads and sideroads. Bezos is taking over.

PS Back at the WaWa: all of the drivers in their Navy, powder blue, and white hoodies and black uniform pants were young---twentysomethings and early thirtysomethings. They were filling themselves up too, with coffee and breakfast sandwiches. But thenone I wish I’d gotten a picture of had climbed up on the rear bumper of her van and, hanging onto the lip of the roof with one hand, was wiping off her rear windows with a big blue rag. Proud of her little rig.

The Steadfast Twin Pumpkins

Posted Friday morning, January 17, 2019.

Deer at work: Mannionville Ranch, Wednesday morning around eight, January 15, 2020.

These two pumpkins had been steadfastly standing guard on either side of our front door since before Halloween. They stayed at their posts through Thanksgiving and I’m sure they’d have gladly maintained vigilance through Christmas, if traditions didn’t dictate against them. But once the wreath was on the door and the tree was in the window, they looked forlorn and out of place, so I moved them into the bushes on the side of the house where I expected the deer who routinely pass through our yard at night to find them and make a midnight snack of them. In the past, they’ve done it. One year they came right up onto the porch to dine. But all through December and almost halfway through January, the pumpkins remained unmolested, whole, round, firm, and intact, looking as if they'd just been plucked from the pumpkin patch. In reality, they'd been plucked from a stand at the grocery store, but never mind. I had decided that I’d take them to the town compost heap. The transfer station’s open on Wednesdays, so Wednesday morning I went out to load them into the back of the car. This is the sight that greeted me. The deer had been at work overnight. It's like they'd been saving the pumpkins for a special occasion but then heard what I was up to and figured they'd better eat while the eating was good.

Hot chocolate, well-deserved

Posted Tuesday morning, December 24, 2019.

Up at five-thirty, first mug of hot chocolate at ten of six. Technically, it was hot cocoa. With miniature marshmallows. In case I was still too sleepy to figure it out on my own, the packet was printed with cheerful instructions, in small but easy to read and friendly blue letters.

EMPTY DELICIOUS COCOA INTO MUG

Did that, no problem.

ADD 8oz OF HOT WATER

Can’t swear it was exactly 8 ounces

(for richer taste add milk)

I skipped the milk. Looked pretty rich as it was.

STIR, SIP, SAVOR.

Done, done, and done.

YOU DESERVE IT.

Yes, I do. I very-well do.

The coffee bar at Majestic's Hardware

Posted Monday morning, December 23, 2019.

Majestic's Hardware, Gardiner, New York, site of Friday’s little victory. December 20, 2019.

Over on Facebook I’m in the habit of cheering myself up after a hard day by posting status updates that announce what I call the day’s little victory. Friday’s took place at our new hardware store. The victory resulted from their having nothing I wanted.

I went in for a few odds and ends. The owner, a thin, cheerful fellow roundabout 70, with steel gray hair combed back from his high forehead, a bashful Stan Laurel smile, and bright eyes behind his glasses, greeted me from the wooden stairs leading up to the second floor as soon as I walked in the door. The store is in the next town over. I’ve only been in a few times since the hardware store here in Mannionville closed back in January, so I don’t think he knows me yet, and he’s always greeted me as if I’m a brand new customer he’s determined to make feel welcome. He asked how he could help me as if helping me would be the making of his day. I gave him my list.

A furnace filter, 25 x 16 x 1?

Sorry. We don’t carry them.

Oh. How about a package of ornament hangers?

Didn’t get any this year.

How about a string of mini Christmas tree lights? We’ve got a dark patch at the bottom of our tree.

Plenty of those.

Hmm. (I looked at the shelf.) All LEDs?

'Fraid so.

Nuts. They won’t match our other lights. (I was really thinking they cost more than I wanted to spend. Thirty bucks for a string of 100.)

Dollar General might still have some of the old-fashioned kind on hand.

Maybe I’ll try there. One last thing. Frosted night light bulbs? We've got a few dark windows in our Christmas village.

His smile turned sad.

All sold out.

I kept my Christmas cheer and tried to hide my disappointment. I was also impressed that he seemed to have his entire inventory in his head.

I know what you have that I need! Coffee!

This caused him to brighten back up.

Help yourself.

I got out a dollar to put in the jar. He stopped me.

Put that away. It’s on the house!

I did as he said, and poured myself a cup. Best coffee I’ve had in weeks.

Merry Christmas, I said, a Happy New Year!

He returned the sentiments and added:

Let’s hope it’s a healthy one for all of us!

I amen-ed to that and strode cheerfully out the door, with no intention of going to Dollar General. I headed for the grocery store. I needed a muffin to go with the coffee.

What are you saying?

There is so such a thing as a hardware store with a coffee bar!

All the finest hardware stores have one.

Coffee is an essential tool for every home repair project.

Nobody is better at being herself

Adapted from the Twitter feed and mined from the notebooks, Tuesday, November 5, 2019. Posted Sunday morning, December 8.

Mrs M, in consultation with her neurologist, having her head examined and showing she's made of sterner stuff, Tuesday, November 5, 2019.

That’s Mrs M in the photo up top, looking at an image from her latest MRI with her neurologist. I don’t know how she does it, but she’s been determined from the beginning to see what’s going on inside there. Me, I cringe and look away, forcing myself to take peeks out of the corner of a squinted eye whenever it sounds like the doctor or the technician is pointing out a salient detail. Like I’ve said this many times: this would all be fascinating if the subject of fascination wasn’t my wife. But Mrs M is made of sterner stuff.

In the midst of our now going on two months of rounds to the surgeon’s and the image facilities down in Westchester, as they try to get her shunts adjusted properly to get her hydrocephalus under control, Mrs M had a routine six-month check-up with her neurologist. His office is in Kingston, an hour to our north. That gave Mrs M an hour to fret on our way there.

“Where are we going again?” she asked a dozen times.

“To see your neurologist,” I said each time as if she hadn’t asked the question before.

“Oh, that’s right. And why am I seeing him?”

“It’s just a routine checkup. He’s just going to assess the progress of your recovery.”

“So I’m going to have my head examined.”

“Yep.”

“Lance, did you ever think you’d have a wife who needed her head examined?”

She was being funny. And every time she said it she made us both laugh. She asks this question a lot, not just on this trip but on on other occasions. It seems to be whenever she starts to feel down about her condition and begins to lose confidence and hope. I have a standard comeback---“Yes, but I didn’t think it would be involve MRIs, CT scans, and X rays. I thought it would be on the couch.”---that she seems to find both funny and reassuring.

Another question she asks often in the same vein  isn’t so much a question as an apology. It’s this one:

“Lance, did you ever think you’d marry such a goofus? I try not to be a goofus. I try to be more of a gallant. But it’s hard. Being a goofess just comes more naturally, these days.”

As we got closer to Kingston, she grew more confident about where we were going and switched from asking to stating.

“I’m seeing the neurologist, right?”

“Yep.”

“And what do I have to know going in?”

“Nothing. You just have to answer his questions.”

That would satisfy her for the moment, but pretty soon she’d loop back again.

“I’m seeing the neurologist, right?”

“Yep.”

“And what do I have to know going in?”

About the fourth or fifth time, though, I said, “Nothing. You don’t have to know a thing. In fact, it’s better if you don’t know anything going in.”

“Why?”

“Because then you might be telling him what I told you and then he couldn’t tell what you know from what you’re repeating.”

“Oh, I get it. He wants me to be myself.”

“That’s right.”

“So I just have to be myself.”

“You just have to be yourself.”

“Ok. I can do that. I can be myself.”

“Yes,” I said, “You can. You’ve always been good at being yourself. That’s why people like you so much.”

“That’s why?”

“Yes. Because by you being yourself so well they feel like they can be themselves.”

“Is that why you liked me?”

“Big part of it. I needed help being myself.”

“And I helped you with that?”

“You sure did.”

“Good. I’m glad.”

“Me too.”

“And I’m seeing the neurologist?”

“You’re seeing the neurologist.”

“And I don’t have to know anything.”

“You don’t have to know anything.”

“I can just be myself.”

“You can just be yourself.”

Today is the 40th anniversary of our first date. It’s true that I asked her out because she was good at being herself. There was no posing or pretense about her and no expectation that I would be anybody with her but myself, and inhibited, introverted prig that I was, I needed all the encouragement to be myself I could get. I still need it. She still gives it. Just by being herself.

And nobody is better at being herself.

Filed under Diary of Her Recovery.

"Nothing in here worth dying for"

Posted Saturday morning, December 7, 2019.

Outside the Mannionville Post Office. Friday afternoon, December 6, 2019.

I can’t imagine being this scared. I can’t imagine being this angry. I can’t imagine being this paranoid. I can’t imagine driving around our relatively peaceful and peaceable neck of the woods with the equivalent of a “BEWARE OF ME!” sign on my car, warning away anyone who happens to park next to me at whatever Tombstone, Dodge City, or Deadwood  I imagine I’ve ventured into to buy groceries or mail a letter or feeling the need to. I can imagine, though, finding the message that goes with the gun silhouette down in the lefthand corner of the gate funny---”BECAUSE SHOOTING TWICE IS JUST SILLY”---because I did. I admit it. It gave me a chuckle.

Ditto the little decal in the driver-side front window that said “Nothing In Here Worth Dying For”.

I’m not a gun control absolutist. I’m not anti-gun. I don’t shrug it off every time I have a close encounter with the owner of a gun who just has to let the world know he---or she---owns a gun, although I wonder why he or she feels a need to let the world know they have a gun. But I’m not automatically---sorry---alarmed. I’m sure I’d feel differently if I lived somewhere children die regularly in the crossfire or if I was black or brown or if I had more first-hand experience with domestic violence or if I lived in an open-carry state and regularly found myself in line at a McDonald’s or a Target with the kind of overgrown idiot child who thought he was making a statement beyond “Watch Out For Me! I’m an Overgrown Idiot Child Who Spends Way Too Much Time Online in Right Wing Chat Rooms” carrying openly. And I do feel differently when I think about it. 

But I grew up in a place where gun ownership usually told you nothing for certain about the gun owners except that they were hunters. And I grew up in an era when gallows humor like this was just that---humor. And I grew up in a time when there were still people alive who remembered when bandits roamed the land and that wasn’t that long ago back then---Bonnie and Clyde and Baby Face Nelson had their heydays in the 1930s, and they were essentially old-fashioned Western outlaws driving fast cars instead of riding fast horses and murdering lawmen and innocent civilians who were unlucky enough to be standing between them and the money they wanted with Tommy guns and the same make and model six-shooters the James Brothers carried. The collective memory never forgets.

Gun ownership isn’t a part of my heritage. My great-grandfather Mannion owned a small confectionery and grocery store in downtown Troy, New York, where Pop Mannion worked as a soda jerk and stockboy when he was a kid, but I I can't recall Pop ever mentioning that Great-grandpop kept any weapons of protection, even a baseball bat, handy in case of robbers. The store was probably protected by its location in a safe and well-trafficked, well-policed neighborhood and, I like to imagine---forgive me, this is the romantic in me---the racketeers Great-grandpop sold illegitimate lottery numbers for. 

The gun owners I’ve known haven’t included any members of my immediate family, but they have included good friends like our friend Chris the Cop, who used to stow the locked and unloaded pistol he carried under his carseat under our bed when he and his family came over for dinner, and a good pal at the Iowa Writers' Workshop who used to kill the chickens her family was having for dinner by shooting them with her rifle from the back porch of her farm house back home in Tennessee. She was a good shot. Had to be. Plugged them right in the head when they were on the move. What I’m getting at is that for most of the gun owners I’ve known personally, their guns were tools not toys. I’ve never had the need for that particular tool any more than I’ve had a need for a stone-cutting saw or a drill press. But I understand why other people might need one.

So, yeah, I laughed. Reflexively. But I did wonder, and I am wondering. This truck has been parked in the lot at the post office the last three times I've made a postal run. It was likely not a coincidence and he---or she---was there on the same stamp-buying, letter-mailing, mailbox-checking I was. There were no or few other customers the times I was there, and the few who were didn’t look like they were that type, if you know what I mean. But then I might just be biased. It’s possible that truck belongs to one of the seasonal postal workers---I’d never noticed it there before---but more probably it’s owned by one of the regulars at the little deli and coffee shop and grocery next door that shares the parking lot with the post office. 

It’s a good bet the owner’s a Trump voter but it’s not a certain bet. Notice the decal covering the whole rear window is an ad for Harley-Davidson. Trump hasn’t been all that fond of Harley-Davidson. He boasts of having bikers on his side, but I guess he imagines they all ride Suzukis. He was all in for Harley-Davidson when the company’s profits fell back in April, thanks to his tariff war.  But last August he was calling for a boycott.. In my (decidedly limited) experience, Harley owners are more loyal to their bikes than to their own mothers. And, here’s a shocker: lots of Democrats, even liberals, own guns and ride motorcycles. There are no partisan stickers or decals on the truck to announce his party affiliation either way. 

Well, the “Don’t Tread on Me” sticker’s pretty much a giveaway. But, again, not necessarily.

The reason I’d bet the driver’s a Republican is that this is a Republican area. We have to keep in mind that most Republicans voted for Trump and are sticking with him because he’s a Republican. Gun-owners are feeling defensive and belligerent these days, even the ones who aren’t fetishists and nutters and paranoids. They think liberals want to take away all their guns, not just the assault rifles. And they’ve got reason to think so.  No, Obama wasn’t going to take away their guns. But many Obama-voters would like to. They would just as soon see all firearms banned and they make no secret of it. But this guy isn’t belligerent, at least not in comparison to the owners of many other Trump trucks on the roads. Trump didn’t invent all the to.weirdness and hate he inspires and exploits. “Protected by Smith and Wesson” and “They Can Take My Gun When They Pry It Out of My Cold Dead Hands” adorned car and truck bumpers along with stickers proclaiming  “Nixon’s the One”.

That's it. I don't have much of a point to make. I'm just giving you a sense of what it's like to live around here. If you happen to be a member of the elite political media and you're reading this, I hope you're noting that we all don't live in bubbles.

There are two other things I want to call attention to, though. The truck is a Ford F-150 and there’s a toolchest in the bed. It’s my observation that among the various makes and models of pickups F-150s are the most likely to be working trucks as opposed to big shiny boy toys. And, if I were to buy a pickup---something I regular dream of being able to do---my first choice would be a Nissan Frontier. My second choice would be an F-150. 

Not this color though.

I’m thinking royal blue.

Filed under Life in These United States.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Recommended background reading: If you want to get a sense of Bonnie and Clyde as old-fashioned Western outlaws, you can watch the movie, naturally. But I think you'd get a better impression not just of those two but of the likes of Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, the Barker gang, and John Dillinger as outlaws operating in what was in many ways still the Wild West from Bryon Burrough's book "Public Enemies", which is available in paperback and for kindle at Amazon and as an audiobook from Audible.

What I get for blogging in public

Posted Saturday morning, November 23, 2019.

So, after Mrs M’s latest CT scan and her appointment with her surgeon Thursday afternoon, we’re sitting in this diner near the hospital, waiting for the waitress to come take our order. CNN’s on the TV hanging from the ceiling nearby. Bobbleheads commenting on the impeachment hearings it looks like. I can’t hear it. What I can hear is someone I think is sitting in the booth underneath. I think he’s there because I can’t see who’s there. The back of the booth’s too high. But he’s repeating the Republican line about the whistleblower, which is: Since the whistleblower wasn’t actually in the room with Trump when he tried to shake Zelensky down, there’s no proof Trump tried to shake Zelensky down, so he can’t be impeached for it. As if eyewitness testimony is the only sure proof of a crime and not the despair of prosecutors when they only have that to build a case on. Ask five people who were right there what happebed when a crime was committed, you get five different, conflicting accounts. Normally, I try to be circumspect when we’re out in public and not talk about politics. It’s not just that people around me don’t want to hear it. They want to enjoy their meals or their coffee in peace. I don’t want to hear it. I want to enjoy my meal or my coffee in peace. If I’m going to be forced to listen to the sound of my own voice, I want to hear me talking about baseball or basketball or movies or the weather. But I’m not always on my best behavior, and I wasn’t this time. I had to say something. I used to call this blogging in public, but I guess it’s more relevant to call it Tweeting in public now. Whatever. I gave in to the temptation.

Not to the guy’s face directly, of course. I wasn’t out to start a fight. I just wanted to give him something to think about. I said to Mrs M, taking advantage of her good nature---she wanted to enjoy her Swiss cheese omelet in peace but she indulges me when I start ranting like I was about to---that the whistleblower isn’t the issue any more than the person who calls 911 is the issue.  He/she/they were just sounding the alarm. The issue is the crime in progress and the perpetrators and that would be Trump’s extortion attempt and Trump himself and his gang.

The point of focusing on the whistleblower is to expose his/her/their identity---which, by the way, is another crime in itself---so Trump’s henchmen in Congress and in the media can make him/her/they an enemy with a face. Whoever it is will be turned into an agent of the Deep State with a personal vendetta against the President. 

The object is to continue to dupe guys like him. Give him something to get angry over instead of thinking about the evidence being laid out before the Intelligence Committee. Give him words to use to drown out whatever words might occur to him on his own and make himself sound smart to himself while he's mindlessly repeating the Party line.

What’s more, the first-hand witnesses he believed the Democrats needed to make their case were testifying right there on TV. Not just on CNN. Fox was covering the hearings too, and, going by what I’ve heard, finding the testimony credible and damning.

I said all this not at the top of my voice, but loud it enough for my voice to carry, and carry it apparently had, because something surprising happened.

The guy shut up.

I was full of self-congratulation.

Until I realized…

The guy hadn’t shut up. There was no guy in that booth to shut up. What I’d taken to be a human being in the room was the voice of one of the commentators on CNN on the speaker mounted on the wall behind the counter across from the empty booth. And one of the waiters had turned it down. Either he’d grown sick of it himself or he wanted to shut me up and go about his work in peace or help the other customers around us enjoy their meals and coffee in peace.

Silently chagrined, I switched to ranting about basketball. Mrs M indulges me on that too.

Happy Meal Barbies hard at work

Posted Monday morning, October 14, 2019.

All these mini-Barbies have jobs. Except one. She has a mission: Happy Meal toy display at the McDonald's in New Paltz, New York. Sunday morning, October 13, 2019.

Yesterday morning, after dropping Mrs M and Ken off at church, I made my usual pilgrimage to the McChapel for a sacramental cup of the best coffee in the world and to use the holy WiFi. While I was waiting for the coffee to transubstantiate, I wandered over to this display of the current choir of Happy Meal Toys. They don’t call them boys meals and girls meals anymore, but that’s what they are. Since there’s no Disney movie being merchandised at the moment, the toys are the usual Mattel go-to’s: Hot Wheels cars for boys, mini-Barbies for girls. The Hot Wheels are standard issue. The Barbies are working dolls. They have jobs. Fun jobs, in the sense that none of them sell insurance, work a cash register, spend the day entering data, or are running for public office. But only one of them is a professional, the veterinarian. Most astronauts are professionals---scientists and engineers, and, considering what they have to know to fly, pilots. Many are multply-degreed, but that’s not what even most grown-ups think of when they think of astronauts. The Barbies’ jobs are the sort of jobs I expect the marketers have determined most little girls can imagine themselves doing and enjoying. Veterinarian, astronaut, firefighter, musician---she's a guitarist who I imagine writes her own songs and fronts her own band. She just has that Taylor Swift vibe about her, even if she’s not blonde--tennis player, ballet dancer, surfer---Surfer’s a job? Can be, dude. I have no idea what the Barbie in the purple ball gown’s supposed to be. An actress on the red carpet maybe?

They’re a multi-ethnic group too. But except for the blonde astronaut and surfer I can’t tell what ethnicity each is. I think the vet is Asian. The dancer might be East Asian Indian. The firefighter could be African American---assuming they’re all Americans---she might be Latina, but so might the tennis player. So might the singer-songwriter and even the actress or whatever she is. The singer-songwriter is wearing cowboy boots but that doesn’t mean she’s a country-western star and it doesn’t signify if she is. She could be from Texas but even Nashville is diverse ethnically and musically nowadays. All of them have long brushable hair. That confuses things. Well, the astronaut doesn't. Her hair is cut short so it doesn't get in the way as she works in zero gravity. Mattel’s keeping it real with her. I wondered how the marketing people decided what the background of each would be.  Why is the astronaut white and not black or brown, for instance. Is the surfer a stereotype or the result of a coin flip? Why a surfer anyway? Wouldn't playing with her get repetitive? Or does she fight off sharks when she wipes out and solve crimes in Hawaii or Malibu when the waves aren’t epic? Maybe there’s some marketing data that determined it. Maybe it was just the result of mental coin flips. It took me a minute, though, to figure out that the tennis player’s skin color was most likely a deliberate choice.

She’s not supposed to be a tennis player.

She’s a hero.

“Serena Williams moves toward the net for a possible volley during her win over Petra Martic at this year’s U.S. Open.” September 1, 2019. Sarah Stier / Associated Press via the Los Angeles Times.

Mrs M takes a vacation

Mined from the notebooks, Monday, August 12, 2019. Posted Friday morning, August 30.

Mrs M taking a mini-vacation in her head while waiting for her root beer float to arrive at the A&W in Lake George Village, Monday, August 12. 2019.

For the first three or four months after her major operations at the beginning of May, 2018, Mrs M experienced extended moments of what I learned are called confabulations when her brain would “get loose”--as she called it---and she would have what I likened to waking dreams. She would think things that were happening in her head---usually a mixing up of real memories with false ones that created in her mind an alternate reality that she reacted to and talked about as if it was the real moment we were living through. She saw the confabulated reality better than what was right before our eyes. 

The physiologic explanation is that her thoughts were trying to work their way around the neurons and synapses broken by the surgeries and had to pass through some unrelated stations where they picked up some oddball passengers who insisted on trying to take the train to their own destinations on the way to where she needed to go in her head to construct her reality for herself. That’s how all our brains work. 

We don’t take in the actual word in front of us all at once. We take in bits and pieces of sensory data out of which we assemble a reasonable and close facsimile to what’s really out there. We miss a lot while we’re at it. That’s why our “reality” can differ to a great degree from someone standing right beside us. That’s the basis of the joke about the blind philosophers and the elephant. It’s why scientists repeat and repeat experiments and test each other’s results. Mrs M’s problem is that her poor injured brain has to work with lots of false and irrelevant data. The fascinating thing was that her confabulations were often more vivid, more interesting, and more fun than what was actually happening before my eyes. This was especially acute when she was in the rehab hospital because her brain was in the early stages of knitting itself back together and there were more broken synapses to navigate around and because the rehab hospital didn’t give either of us much interesting to look at or think about. Her daily life there was necessarily routine and boring. So for her own sanity’s sake, she took every opportunity to...escape. For instance, one day we were sitting on the hospital’s back patio, quietly enjoying the view of the Hudson River and the mountains beyond. Or I was anyway. Mrs M had been elsewhere.

“Well, that was a nice walk,” she suddenly announced.

“You went for a walk?” I asked with seemingly normal and mild curiosity, trying not to smile too broadly. By this point I’d learned not to be surprised by anything surprising she said and also not to challenge it. Trying to snap someone in her condition back to “reality” only adds to their confusion and upsets them. And it embarrasses them.

By the way, this also applies to dementia patients.

“Where did you go?”

“Canada,” she said, matter of factly, as if Canada was just down the block and a regular destination for a casual stroll. Of course she hadn’t been for a walk anywhere, let alone Canada. She couldn’t even if she tried. She still had to use a wheelchair to get around. Which she hated, so it’s no wonder she was taking walks in her head.

“Did you have a good time?” I asked, doing a good job of not laughing.

“Yes. I had a very good time.”

“What did you like best?”

“Oh, the views.”

The confabulations continued after she came home, but they became less and less divorced from reality, grew fewer and farther apart, and lasted for less and less time. She came home in mid-July and by the end of October the confabulations were more or less gone. She still has moments, usually when she wakes up in the morning, when she’s elsewhere and elsewhen. Her mother’s is her favorite place to wake up in. But often it will happen on car rides. She’ll know where we’re going but not when we are. The drive will be taking place years in the past, when the Mannion guys were still teenagers and Old Father Blonde and Pop Mannion are still alive and waiting for us to visit. But with very little prompting, she’ll think---or remember---her way back to the present, apparently unconcerned and unsurprised by her brain’s having gotten loose again. “That’s right,” she’ll say if she had to be nudged back on track, and continue the conversation as if she’d only gotten a minor fact wrong, like the date, which, when you think about it, is all she’d done. She’d checked her mental calendar and seen the date marked with a video clip instead of a written note. She has a digital diary and sometimes simply turns to the wrong page. What is more likely to occur along the lines of a confabulation is that she will get lost in her thoughts for a few minutes and in those few minutes she will review a lifetime’s worth of memories. This happened today [Monday, August 12, 2019] after Uncle Jim’s funeral.

The mass was held at Uncle Jim and Aunt Norma’s church, Our Lady of the Annunciation, in Glens Falls, which is about fifteen minutes south of Lake George. So when the mass was done and the services at the cemetery finished, we decided to head on up to Lake George Village for root beer floats at the A&W, one of our favorite places when we used to be able to get up to the Village more often. While we were waiting for the one overworked but cheerful waitress to take our order, Mrs M said, “Well, this a nice vacation?”

“You consider this a vacation?” I asked casually, not forgetting my lessons.

“Of course! Don’t you?”

It was just Ken and me at the picnic table with her---Oliver was under the weather so he’d stayed home---and we looked at each other with bemusement. Neither of us were sure we should remind her we’d just been to a funeral.

“Too bad it’s so short,” was all I could think to say.

“Oh, it’s lasted long enough,” she said cheerfully, sounding as if she was having a nice time but was content for the vacation to be over. It turned out that she had been on vacation in her head. She’d been remembering and reliving all our past visits to Lake George going back to when were still dating and telling herself all the stories I’ve told her about the Mannion family trips to my grandparents’ camp on the lake when we Mannion kids were kids, and she’d conflated the memories and the stories into one long and happy vacation that was winding up with one last trip out for ice cream. Her pleasure was so infectious that by the time our floats came I was on vacation too.

Filed under Diary of Her Recovery.

All work and no play makes Luke Mannion a dull boy. All work and no play makes Luke Mannion a dull boy. All work and no play...

Posted Wednesday night, August 28, 2019.

My brother Luke Mannion's new used camper at dawn, all packed up and ready for a trip to the far north. August 7, 2019.

My brother Luke and my sister-in-law C just returned home to their little cabin in the Connecticut woods after a long explore of the wild North. THe'd bought a van---used. A 1998 Dodge Ram 3500. Nineteen feet from stem to stern.---filled its tanks with 35 gallons of gas and 13 gallons of water, loaded the larder and stocked the fridge, and set out at the beginning of the month for Canada. Their destination was Prince Edward Island. Luke reported in by text whenever he could get a good cell phone connection. He was a little imprecise in his geography but I got the impression that he and C traversed the whole province, campground by campground. I think they saw every tree in PEI and took its picture. A good time was had by all, especially by their son, who got to stay home with the cats. Luke and C are hearty and experienced campers and good traveling companions. It was a fine vacation, although the trip home was wearing. They got roughed up by U.S. Customs agents when they were crossing back into the U.S.---or so Luke claims---and then discovered that Maine keeps expanding downward as you head south. It began to seem that the homeward journey would go on forever and they’d be wandering Down East for eternity. Luke texted that he was beginning to despair of ever exiting the Lobster State.

When Ken Mannion heard of his aunt and uncle’s distress he announced that it sounded like they were trapped in a novel by Maine’s favorite literary son and he instructed me to text a warning.

Watch out for clowns.

And big dogs.

And driverless cars.

And high school girls in prom dresses with telekinetic powers and anger management issues.

I texted Ken’s warning and added a warning of my own.

And don’t take a caretaker job at a remote motel thinking it’ll be a nice, quiet place to get some writing done.

Luke sent back a picture of where he and C were spending the night.

“Redrum! Redrum!”