But actually I just wanted to describe that diner food

I'm feeling Bill Brysony and like narrating my weekend of experiences. The 315-er experiences and bicycling in the finger lakes experiences.

This weekend I lived a dream I'd had of moving here, a dream called Seeing My Old Loved Ones and Bicycling To Get There. I managed to be both in Syracuse, Phelps (for church organ), and Parent's Lake House all without having to sit bored and lonely in my car.  The magic of a bicycle is that it can be shoved into the back of a conveniently-passing-by-Geneva aunt's or uncle's vehicle for one direction, and pedaled back on its own for the other direction. Or vice versa. And I'd much rather spend time enjoying the company of others while driving.

Uncle Aggressive, who maneuvers both cars and bicycles with utmost precision and utmost impatience, hefted my bicycle into the back of his car, "This thing is heavy as *$&#^" he said, and then later as we're buzzing along the thru-way: "what's that noise?" "My bicycle," I responded. And Aunt Accommodating: "It is settling." It has been rare for me to spend time with relatives without the churning holiday backdrop of other relatives, and I thoroughly enjoyed being with them just as them. They'd kindly taken a modified snow-plow to the floor of Cousin Just Moved Off To College's room and made the bed for me and I gratefully tip-toed in there at an unmentionable hour after a blast of a night out in the city. Best of both worlds: time with family and going out.

I need to explain the giddiness of my Going Out with the context of spending a lot of time with plants. The other weekend, my dear Buddy Holly (also a gardener) and I were at a happy hour and I spread my arms in an expanse all pleased, "Look! PEOPLE!" And she responded, so knowingly, "I know, right, not plants."  

Although I do love my plants. Early Friday morning the kale was all perky and puffy and glistening, shrouded evenly in glistening water droplets. I had to stop and lean on my hoe for a minute and just take that in. These moments! These stoppings during the day, to stretch up to the clouds, to listen into the birds, to gaze lovingly at the kale. Even just short moments but they add nuggets to a day on the farm.

Friday was Syracuse, Saturday was bicycling back from Syracuse, Sunday was bicycling to church, bicycling to the lake, enjoying a lake birthday bash, and then being ferried back with Aunt Charismatic, talking about organs and hymns.

A hundred mile weekend, all for Destinations and Transportation, no loops for me! But biking alone for 60 miles under gray clouds and the brain needs to occupy itself with something. (although recently I have been blessed to have two new bicycling buddies for conversing along powered by endorphins, making for some enthusiastic blasts of conversations) These are some of my occupying thoughts. Oh look a gas station, gas is cheaper there! How nice. OH WAIT tra-la I don't need to buy gas tra-la! And also some rendition of the following, Stanton Village. Stanton is a variety of fresh market cabbage! This is thanks to the fact that I've been working long enough on a demonstration vegetable farm which grows 140 different varieties of vegetables--all of which have names--and so I begin seeing them around. Batavia Broccoli. Rally leeks. Roxanne onions ("ROX-anne....Put on the red light").

Bicycling through Auburn, I saw the Hunter's Diner-ant, one of those classic grey-sided train-car shaped things out of the 50's. I'd seen it portrayed in an exhibit of Gorgeous and Nostalgic Fingerlakes Photographs and decided that made it sufficiently a thing so that I should go in and have breakfast at 4pm or too many hashbrowns or a tuna-fish sandwich. I tend to believe that I am wholly charmed by diners (from the Americana attachment, the cheap menu options, the classic goodness of grilled plastic cheese cut on the diagonal and served with a pickle) only until after I have eaten at one. I eat at them so infrequently that this disenchanted refractory period has long since dissipated and I've forgotten my disgust and go back in all eagerly again.

Hunter's Diner-ant was a stellar example of this; in fact, I might even nominate this experience as The Worst Food I Have Ever Purchased And Consumed (the qualifier there being "purchased" because I myself occasionally create offending food, but then I feel Responsible and eat it out of guilt anyway).  I did what one sensibly does in a diner at 4pm, and ordered Breakfast. 2 eggs and a piece of toast. I asked for the eggs scrambled and with a good portion of mozzarella cheese in there for some excitement.

My plate came with a garnish (I believe an inner leaf of a curly variety of kale--oh GOOD, also thanks to this vegetable job I'm identifying garnishes....), two pieces of bread yet to mature into toast (it is only toast if the unidentified white fatty substance spread atop melts; but I suppose this was teenage toast because they were slightly warm), and a deposit of yellow and white egg-like substance in a stretch across the plate.

The sort of stretch reminiscent of something a cat would discharge while retching and harking itself backwards across your carpet.

This discharge tasted nothing of eggs nor mozzarella and had a consistency I was at a loss to identify; and also of course they were only marginally warm. I thought briefly of asking Waitress Peggy if actually they were eggs but decided I didn't really want to know this anyway. Although this "meal" didn't assuage my hunger, it did neuter my appetite and I bicycled onward only $4.32 the worse for wear, dreaming about my own homemade spicy kale I would eat for dinner and, as a sort of retort, coming up with terrible descriptors for the obese man eating laboriously in the booth next door.


Besides that though...the weekend included:
A concert on a sloped and slidey floor of the Westcott Theatre, the artists singing their 315 (area code) pride, their 'cuse pride. This was the first time I'd seen genuine 315-er pride; I'd only heard 315 as derogatory in the trailor-park liquor store four-wheeler type. I took it in and people-watched and knew it was right to be there and danced and felt the energy from the band--and watched that marvelous condition of a feedback loop where the band feeds the crowd and the crowd responds to feed the band and oh my this is hot raw human celebration and expression right there.

Also:
Making Dense N Chocolaty zucchini muffins for my hosts, biking so many roads in foggy and sunny and cloudy bliss, my mother's truly impressive chocolate birthday cake with my Dad and all his siblings, spraying along in the rain on bicycle to the Syracuse farmers market. Meandering this farmers market with that particularly tall and particularly eye-catching young man, eating all the carbohydrates I ever wanted because I was soon to be bicycling a distance. Now that is just about the top of the tower right there: exploring the colorful and delicious onslaught of a farmers market with a very attractive person.

To wrap up:
A church gentleman made me an inquiry while I warmed up on the organ, "Is that your bike outside?" he asked, and then added, "I thought so. I could tell it wasn't just anyone's bike. But someone very serious about biking."

Very true. And the core of this good life.

Burning candles and growing up: realizations had while weeding

Realization 1.
I suppose this little realization is ordinary and understood by many, but for me it came as rather a surprise. Maybe because I have been living for only a little while, and only really thoroughly living with presence for much less than that. I am still thrilled by the recent novelty of talking to people, playing with color, feeling confidence and a little boldness.

My realization was about Transferability. When I was living near Seattle my time was cultivating new experience and pushing myself to get the most of Being Far From Home, packing my weekends full of dancing, meeting people, bicycle rides on the islands, and then Sunday serenely playing pipe organ usually after sleeping in a slightly compromised situation (friend's couch or church basement) but taking energy from that and powering onward. My Mom calls this Burning the Candle at Both Ends, and I call it All The More Flame Thank You.

I thought this rich living of a life for me was Seattle itself: the public transportation to anywhere, the outgoing people, the mountains, the celebration of expression and strangeness. But I learned the other weekend that it might not be Seattle, but that it might be something actually transferable.

In Rochester: Dancing, bicycle riding, IPA-ing, crashing a party, then sleeping in a corner of what was essentially a construction site (the house of a friend dear enough I could ask to crash there, even though it was undergoing remodeling so thorough the inside was unrecognizable). The next morning brushing off residual wood dust and setting out for my church organ job and stopping for coffee--not at one of the dozens of Seattle local roasters, but at the Square One Diner in rural NY ignoring the questionable slick of sheen on the coffee--driving my car--not dozing off over a New Yorker in a choice bus seat. But unlike Novelty Distant Washington, here, thanks to the gift of proximity, my parents filed in as pew audience. As did Mr. New Bicycle Boy. I didn't invite anybody; they just showed up on their own agenda and this pleased me in that warming and dearly supportive way. Even here I still feel like the, no doubt strange, "purple haired lady" (according to Little Mr. Four-year-old at my Tacoma church), eating a second breakfast out in the church yard, poking focusedly about for 4-leaf clovers.

Realization 2.
Another realization I had--this came while weeding around some cabbages--was about Growing Up. I've been pondering lately, When Is One Grown-up? I've almost 27 now and I haven't felt the phase change I was expecting and by now it has been most certainly due. "Grown-up" I thought was where you are very good to remember to take out the trash, you make measurably more money than you did as a teenager, you understand things like taxes and car insurance, that maybe even you are a little dull and predictable. Or maybe it meant having a dog, having more than one piece of furniture to call your own, being settled with a partner.

But maybe not. I realized within the past couple years ago I began to have a sense of style (personal style mind you, not conforming to a magazine's proven aesthetic one, but simply my own), that I was beginning to know how to easily talk to people, how to make a decision balanced and carefully, how to express complicated thoughts, how to make people laugh, and how to take care of myself to be happy and healthy. This feels not so much the caricature of the "grown up" responsible and dowdy, but more like a Growing Into. Splitting at the seams of potential--growing into them--and feeling pretty good about it. 

So I think I'm growing into now. And it's pretty great.