Road trip, no road trip

Zelda called me at work. "Can I borrow your sleeping bag?"
"Sure".
"Where is it?"
"In a box in the back corner of the garage."
"Okay."

She was leaving that night to drive two hours north, where her friend Megan lives, and travel the next day to the Big Apple to celebrate Megan's birthday. They would stay with their friend Emma in Queens, do Newyorkish things - museums, restaurants, the Empire State Building - and connect with her brother Jessi. Then Jessi would ride back with them to central Swingstate.

"Have a good trip."
"Okay. I will return with your son...if you agree to my demands."

Of course I agreed, not knowing what her demands are. My hands were tied, officer.

I didn't hear from her for several days, then when I came home from work on Tuesday, there was a big tall guy in the living room.

By Jessi's account, his sister and her friend got into Queens and went to "The Lion King" in Manhattan Friday night. The next day, Zelda and Megan took a tour bus around town, then met Jessi at a bar on the Lower East Side, where they disagreed about the band. Sunday more tours. Monday, they all went to the MoMA for a Van Gogh exhibit, packed their bags, picked him up in Brooklyn, followed GPS right into rush-hour traffic, and eventually made it out of town, across New Jersey and Pennsylvania, into Ohio around midnight, and home around three.

Youth is not wasted on the young; they're the only ones who could survive it.

Jessi spent plenty of quality time with Gven during the week, much of it having to do with finding the right shoes. I didn't see much of him, except in passing, until Friday, when we went to Franklin Park Conservatory for a good part of the afternoon. That was low-key fun, just chilling among the plants, rocks, two butterflies (one live and one dead), and a very loud toucan. Revelations at every turn inside and out at a nice little community garden.

Then we joined Zelda and Gven at Cuisine of India in the suburbs for dinner. Zelda regaled us with her version of her weekend in the Big Apple, which closely paralleled her brother's version but with more attitude in the first-person. The food, especially the okra, which I was compelled to order after seeing some thriving plants at the garden, was fantastic. We returned to Om Shanty for cake, only a couple of weeks late for Jessi's birthday.

By this time I had made up my mind not to drive back to New York with Jessi, although the semblance of a plan had been weighing on my mind all week. Advance or retreat? Should I stay or should I go? Whether to cross the great water or hold the fort? I consulted several trusted sources of oracular guidance, and the answers were predictably inconclusive. After all, why ruin a good dilemma with a clear-cut solution?

In the end, I decided on the conservative course of action (retreat/stay/hold) and proceeded to plod through a sullen, morose, regretful weekend. I dropped Jessi at the bus station and went home to clean and straighten up the ongoing bad dream house. I had a hard time focusing on one project at a time. I worked out some of my frustration cutting up fallen trees with the chainsaw, separating logs to be stacked from logs to be split. Remember that great wood-splitting scene from "The Return of the Secaucus Seven"?

I sunned Saturday morning, and I sat Sunday morning. I tried to differentiated the causes of my irritability from its circumstances, and I didn't get very far. I started two batches of bread: the sourdough died in the bowl, probably suffocating on its own overfermentation, and the yeasted dough baked up nicely into two of my best loaves ever, made from local wheat, local honey, and cranberries from the Mann family farm in Buzzard's Bay, Massachusetts, where Jessi will be some time today.