Tires, cereal and historical intersections
Got some big bad studded snow tires that sound like heavy rainfall on the concrete. All right, Old Man Winter, do your worst.
Steve and I went grocery shopping last night. Each time I come across a certain particular product at the grocery store, I feel more annoyed by it. This particular product is a cereal called “Good Friends” and it can only be found in the organic food aisle. Not only is the name and supposed organicness obnoxious, but the close up of two big overly wholesome faces smiling cheek-to-cheek over the cereal bowl is really annoying. What the hell kind of friends are they? Since when do you eat organic cereal first thing in the morning with a friend in your kitchen? When you are in a situation like that with a “friend”, it is under much more suspect and less wholesome circumstances than these cheeky people would ever be in.
Just thought I’d put that out there.
As I was driving through Middlebury tonight, I realized it was another location that embodied a historical intersection of my life. There are a handful of places like this and whenever I pass through one I experience so many disparate memories coming together in this one place. There something very affirming about it, as if there is more purpose in our lives than we may know or understand.
For example, Middlebury, Vermont. I first went to Middlebury with my Dad in the spring of ‘96 to interview with the admissions office at Middlebury College. Afterwards my Dad went back to the hotel and I drove around the town and the campus by myself, envisioning my life in college. I went up a hill and suddenly and unexpectedly I was on a dirt road and the scene was so breath taking I pulled over to the side of the road. I stopped across from a white farmhouse with a weeping willow tree out front and cows grazing out back. Evening was falling and the dark indigo sky paled down to the pink horizon. A bright full moon was rising above the purple mountains. Out from under the weeping willow, two pure white geese came walking, padding over the dirt road in webbed feet. And so, in that way I fell in love with Vermont.
I returned to Middlebury several more times without planning to- with friends from Silver Bay to eat at the Dog Team Tavern, a tournament at the college when I played tennis for Hamilton. And tonight, here I was, 25 and married and on my way to my first reassessment visit for a new job, driving through Middlebury.
I felt a jolt of pure joy. Life is good.
Nov 12th 2003Uncategorized