September 18, 2006
Changes
Changes in daily routines are more resistant in these later years. For one thing, I’ve been at it a long time, longer than I like to think, so I’ve cobbled together a kind of working plan. Then along comes serendipity like a chance to spend a span in another ambiance, a venue not of one’s own.
This time it’s a place by a finger lake in New York, a lake clawed out two million years ago by a glacier two miles thick and no telling how many miles wide in its hands and its reach. The tremendous pressure of its weight caused the ice to flow and form a massive continental ice sheet. New York state was pretty well covered. Due to long-term temperature changes, the southern edge of our “local” glacier retreated and advanced several times, scraping, pushing, and dragging huge volumes of rock and soil, scattering monster boulders (xenoliths) here and there. Glaciers have little respect for the property they gouge, taking one land’s good topsoil and moving it south toward another’s.
CP and I are in western New York state to enjoy a respite, as if all of retired life were not a respite. The finger lake by whose shores we respire is some thirty miles long, but narrow as lakes go.
The original Chautauqua Institution down the road a piece has a market corner on quaint. Take a collection of frame Victorians, some with as many as five floors, complete with intricate gingerbread in multiple colors, and you’re getting the idea. Take a resplendent library with a second floor devoted to audio — sheet music out of the twenties (Crosby and Ukulele Ike side by side) plus gramophones. The “largest outdoor pipe organ in the world” in an amphitheatre to match it is just around the corner. There’s even an “Episcopal Cottage” somewhere. CP and I toured the grounds including the lobby of the Athenaeum, a 19th century hotel ($300/day single), with conference rooms furnished with elegant pine Windsor armchairs. No folding stackables on chair dollies here.
Pulsing through the quaint, however, is a Wi-Fi system about as modern as one can get and available in the resident Smith Library to such as OoN. I like morals in these stories, but there’s too much bliss around here to find one, nor am I in the humor.
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